Max Brun explains how Pacaso solved the cold-start problem by tapping MLS databases for instant supply, then finding off-market homes through public records. The first sale came from a property the team identified and contacted directly, building a differentiated inventory that attracted sellers before they listed elsewhere.
Chapters
You know, as marketplaces, we typically face the, you know, the kind of chicken and the egg or the cold start problem, right? In the very beginning. So, you know, how did you solve that with Pacaso? It's a super difficult problem that we're still trying to solve. To be clear, it's not fully solved yet. But one of the benefits of real estate that is not true of many categories is that most of the supply is already aggregated. And already accessible via the multiple listing service. So all the homes that are, or almost all the homes that are available for sale are syndicated through these services. And as a vendor or a broker, there are ways to get access to that supply so you can kind of seed, you know, one side of the marketplace with supply right out of the gate. So that's how we started. Although I would say that we didn't really utilize it to the fullest extent. We tried to start really small. We picked a couple of markets and just a couple of homes. And in fact, the first home that we ever sold was not an actively listed home. It was actually supply that we sourced manually because we thought that having unique supply and you know, I think still believe that having unique supply is a pretty important, you know, part of the strategy. And the way that we support, source that unique supply initially is through public records. So we basically kind of identified the markets we were interested in, downloaded the public records, made some assumptions based on the public record data around that would enable us to try to determine which homes were not occupied as primary homes. And we just contacted those owners through a variety, or attempted to contact those owners through a variety of channels. And, you know, some people expressed interest and that's how we kind of seeded the marketplace initially. Now what has happened over time is, you know, as we've scaled up demand, we've scaled up supply in parallel. through a combination of sources, you know, we continue to get more and more unique supply. And some of that unique supply has just compounded in a positive way as our brand has become more well-known and more proven. So like, for example, now we have sellers that come to us directly before they go to real estate agents or the MLS. We have builders that come to us directly before they list their homes online. We have agents that bring homes directly to us before they list in the MLS. All that took a couple of years of like trust building and credibility building with the industry. But we still also use the MLS syndication network to supplement the supply that we have on our website. And we're going to do a lot more of that in the future as we, as we expand into more markets.
