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Real estate technology company HomeScout has upped its lead generation capabilities with the acquisition of Trinity Oak Partners, a real estate-focused data and business generation company with a number of existing relationships with brokerages, according to a Dec. 21 press release sent exclusively to Inman.
HomeScout is a long-known brand in the industry and was itself acquired in 2021 by mortgage fintech FirstClose and prior to that by HomeGain more than 20 years ago. It relaunched to offer home search tools in 2007 and was bought again in 2022 by its current CEO, David Camp.
Its software products blanket a number of needs for agents and consumers, spanning branded home search, lending, approvals and services, lead generation, agent marketing, referrals, website creation and a host of other services. Buyers and sellers can use it to find a mortgage, home and agent.
“Trinity Oak Partners created a niche in the lead generation business,” said David Camp, CEO of HomeScout, in the press release. “They have a customer base comprised of only top 100 real estate brokerages that utilize their end-to-end system to engage with past customers and make them repeat clients.”
Trinity Oak Partners uses an AI-based solution to engage buyers and sellers for long-term nurture with an emphasis on helping them conduct multiple transactions with the same agent, an ongoing challenge for much of the industry.
Asked about how its lead identification and outreach, Camp said in an email to Inman that Trinity Oaks scours a brokerage’s existing database.
“Trinity Oaks only uses past customer data from the brokerages database. We then cleanse their data through HomeScout Intel, which has access to 230,000,000 Americans. We then score each consumer with their propensity to buy or sell through AI, then our ISA team calls each prospect that scores high and we verify that they are wanting to speak with an agent, then warm transfer them over to a point of contact within the brokerage.”
Camp’s efforts with the company include rebuilding its primary product suite to focus on “the goal of designing the ultimate consumer destination to find a home, find a loan and find a Realtor,“ the release stated. Camp apparently is making a ”seven-figure investment“ in the company.
Lead generation is key to any enterprise, but real estate brokerages and agents are especially prone to bad players within the space. From repurchased databases of long outdated records to shady coaches and gurus and YouTube influencers, there’s no media channel unmolested by the appeals of lead salesman. Compounding the issue is a market weak in inventory and more licensed agents than the industry needs to serve current leads and clients.
Additionally, ever transaction-minded, brokers and agents tend to benchmark any technology purchase against its ability to generate immediate ROI, neglecting the value it could provide to the back-end operation or how it could make agents more efficient and better at addressing customer needs.
HomeScout’s ramp-up in this space should provide some solace to customers, current and future, merely because of its understanding of what defines a worthwhile opportunity for business.
The company also sells HomeScout Intel, an AI and market analytics solution for mortgage lead discovery; HomeScout Advantage, to address the marketing needs of brokerage operations; and HomeScout Pro for real estate agents, that offers, “a comprehensive suite of tools and CRM system built to help [real estate professionals] protect and mine [their] database.“
