Alexey Igoshin (HomeApp) changes the rules of the game on the Russian real estate market using information technology

Alexey Igoshin could not only solve his own housing problem, but also began to help others. He founded an online service that works in the interests of tenants and home buyers. This, in his opinion, HomeApp is fundamentally different from other services and offline real estate agencies.

When developing the project, Alexey was guided by the progressive experience of foreign colleagues both in technical terms and in the selection of a business model.

Over the year, the team developed the frontend, and was also able to implement complex algorithms for processing large data arrays, including artificial intelligence algorithms. The founder of the project believes that the team has taken a good pace and "does everything right."


I was told that you are graduates of an American university who returned to Russia with this project. Have you started making HomeApp while still in the West? Or did this idea come to you after you were in Russia and saw some problems in real estate?
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The idea appeared in America. Nikita and I (co-founder of the company) studied at BerkeleyHaas business school in California. There is an exchange program that allows you to spend half a year at Columbia University. Accordingly, I needed to move to New York and find an apartment there for half a year. I realized that New York is the same Moscow in terms of the behavior of realtors and real estate services.


Nikita Zhilin - HomeApp co-founder

The objects were shown to me by a realtor, who immediately began “pushing” in some crazy apartments in the Harlem area at inadequate prices. As a result, I found an apartment myself, having spent a crazy amount of time and a lot of money on a hotel, but I ran it myself and organized everything myself.

In Moscow, I came across exactly the same thing: realtors often offer you an incomprehensible thing, they ask for a lot of money, they are often ready to cheat. And the market as a whole can not be called civilized. So, I flew to business school first, and my wife had to go two months later. We quickly decided to leave, and reported this to the owner of a rented apartment. The owner reacted inadequately, evicted her, violating all the agreements: his wife called and cried, wondered how such a thing was possible ...

And how did you come to the conclusion that this problem has a solution, that it is you who can solve it?

A year before me, the MBA at Columbia University was completed by the man who founded Compass .

Now the valuation of this company is ~ $ 1 billion. It employs more than 800 brokers. Service launched in 2013.

I saw how they started and entered the New York market, and now the business is valued at $ 1 billion. I really liked their idea to “expand” the real estate market in the direction of the buyer / tenant, to create high-quality service through technology. I saw how the guys smashed the city into districts, and in every district of New York they had their own experts, or people whom they had made experts using data.

This problem is also close to me because I have been involved in various technologies all my life, including data science. I realized that this was the idea that I would like to bring to life. I also liked the idea that due to technology, you can change the "dirty" real estate market in Moscow, so that other people become realtors.

The main idea of ​​HomeApp is to replace “bad” people with good data?

Not really. The first thing we want to do is to turn this market over to the person who is looking for an apartment, to make an ideal customer-service. Now there are many technological products for realtors, for homeowners, but there are no services that can make life easier for a potential tenant or apartment buyer.

The second task is to dramatically improve the efficiency of brokers through data analysis technology. Indeed, in fact, any real estate agent is an information broker: he knows the best deals, knows the demand. He does not sell bricks, he owns the information.

More and more companies began to appear in the world, which are striving to make brokers at times more efficient. In America, there is the Redfin company, which every year closes four to five times more transactions (per broker on average) than their competitors.

Redfin turnover is $ 50 + million. The company has more than 200 brokers.

Good. Let's talk about your product. You have launched a web service in Moscow. And while you work in only one city?

Yes, they decided to start with Moscow.

How does this situation look like now? There are some people who call themselves realtors who want to charge me 100% of the monthly rental price and drive me to the apartments that they want to rent as quickly as possible. My interests here are counted last.

I also live in Moscow and rent an apartment. I absolutely understand all the possible problems with this.

So, you came to the Moscow market, collected some primary amount of data. What has changed as a result for a person who is looking for an apartment? Has it become faster and easier? Only faster? Only easier? Cheaper? In what degree? What customer satisfaction metrics do you focus on? What are you targeting your investors?

There are a lot of metrics. We, for example, consider NPS (Net Promoter Score) for those people who have signed a contract with us and with whom we helped to find an apartment. NPS shows how willing people are to recommend us. We ask all our customers how much they liked the service, please rate the service from 0 to 10. Our current indicator is 9 out of 10.

Measuring consumer loyalty index (NPS) involves several steps:

1. Consumers are asked to answer the question “What is the probability that you will recommend a company / product / brand to your friends / acquaintances / colleagues?” On a 10-point scale, where 0 corresponds to the answer “I will not recommend it in any way”, and 10 - "I will definitely recommend."
2. Based on the estimates obtained, all consumers are divided into 3 groups: 9-10 points - product / brand promoters, 7-8 points - neutral consumers, 0-6 points - critics (detractors).
3. Direct calculation of the NPS index. NPS = Proportion of Critics.

Another metric is the number of views of apartments that a person types before entering into a contract with us. On average, the market value is 4-5. We have this figure is in the region of 2.5. We save man time. It is difficult for a client to understand something from photographs, therefore our task is to remove apartments that are obviously unsuitable for him from the scope of the search.



Does artificial intelligence help you cut off false or inaccurate ads? Is it your know-how, your main competitive advantage or is it just a technology that allows people working with clients to more effectively carry out their activities?

From the point of view of data, our value is not in the fact that we use some kind of megastreat algorithms or neural networks. We are constantly rebuilding processes and collecting data. For example, how duplicate ads are excluded from the list: information is processed not only by algorithms, but also by people. After all, we are not in New York, where there is an open public verified data on all real estate objects.

We can only create this database ourselves. After each display of the apartment, the expert enters the data about it into our system. So we gradually learn that the owner's realtor is constantly late. If a fraudster agent appears, his phone also remains in the database, and then the ads with his contacts are blocked. We build all the processes on a brick by brick basis so that the quality of the data becomes higher and higher.

We broke Moscow into the same neighborhoods in terms of the quality of houses, distance from the metro. Therefore, we now at the data level understand how much more expensive or cheaper an apartment is than the average for the area. On this basis, conclusions can be drawn about how quickly she “will leave.”

But again, the algorithms do not perform 100% of the work. At least 10% should be given to people. And even after that sometimes errors occur. For example, you can not say that we do not have duplicates at all. They are, but they are negligible.

How long have you been working in the Moscow market? Roughly speaking, what is the release date of your product?

All that I am talking about cannot be built in one day. We made the first version of the site a year ago. Mobile application released in September.

How did you start this project? With investor money? With your money? Without money?

At first, when I was still in business school, I had no money. Then we invested our money. Well, after that we raised about $ 500,000 of investment in the seed round.

Well, while you are not trying to actively raise funds in the market?

While we are just starting to communicate with the funds about this.

Have you already gotten a plus? Or to zero? What does your business look like today if you told the auditor about it, for example? How many customers do you have? What is the turnover? How do you assess your position on the Moscow market?

The most important metrics now are NPS, as I have already said, the growth rate and the number of transactions per expert on the area.

And how does the value of this metric change over time?

Growing fast. It was important for us to develop a quality application. For example, we created an instant messenger that allows us to more quickly serve our customers. The broker has the ability to simultaneously lead a large number of people.

We very quickly learned to see all the options and select apartments for a particular person. So, we make to our experts a “heat map” of apartments that the client has already looked at in order not to recommend him what he has already seen.

The market for renting and selling apartments is very dynamic: a good apartment in Moscow goes away in a few hours. Therefore, efficiency is critical for us. In September, the number of transactions per broker will be 3-4. And this is a good result.

Are brokers staffed by your company? Or are these people who are already engaged in real estate, but who additionally cooperate with you?

Yes, these are our full-time employees who are fundamentally different from ordinary agents. These are people with higher education, experience, they want to develop, learn new things, analyze what is happening in the market. The first employees who came to work with us were graduates of Moscow State University, oddly enough. It so happened that almost half of our experts are now students or graduates of a Moscow university.

That is, these are people who were not in the past connected with the rental market or real estate?

Not always, but we have a completely different principle of operation. We work in the interests of clients who are looking for apartments. Regular realtors work in the interests of homeowners. In addition, our services are much cheaper.

What do you think about ZIAN as a leader in this market? What do you think about startups that play on the same field with you?

TSIAN is a very good company that is improving very quickly. We are not quite competitors with them, we do not have a goal to bypass the CIAN.

Of course, I look at startups that appear on the Russian real estate market. But they are all different.

There are, for example, The Locals. They have another mission - they help people find an apartment without intermediaries. We want to create an intermediary that people really need.

Clear. You have a vision of who you want to be ...

Do you have a lot of employees in the company? From the point of view of legal organization. How actively do you expand, grow?

We currently employ 35 people.



Is the development department also in Moscow? Do you have a lot of developers? And in general, how much labor is the development of such a product?

We have a difficult technical product, an extremely complex frontend. Backend in terms of data, analytics are just as difficult to develop. In addition, we implement many things first in Russia.

We have more than one product, there are a lot of them. Over the year, we have advanced well: we have created a website, a mobile application, and have built up this whole “fake” that analyzes and filters out data. I'm not saying that we have come to some cosmic result, but the speed with which we are moving shows that we are doing everything correctly.