According to HousingWire, HomeServices of America has acquired 1000WATT, a research and strategy firm that has spent nearly two decades working inside the real estate industry. The two founders of 1000WATT, Brian Boero and Marc Davison, will now lead strategy and creative efforts for HomeServices, taking on roles as chief marketing and strategy officer and chief creative officer respectively. The entire 1000WATT team will be folding into HomeServices as an internal resource.
What HomeServices is really doing here is bringing these research and content capabilities in-house to support its larger vision of what they're calling a "Complete Real Estate Experience." This comes on the heels of work the two companies did together over the past year to launch OnePoint, which is HomeServices' unified technology platform designed to connect all their different services under one branded consumer experience.
HomeServices operates as an umbrella for a lot of different pieces of the real estate transaction: they own brokerage operations, a top-tier mortgage lender, title companies across all fifty states, insurance operations, and mortgage servicing. For a long time, these divisions operated separately even though they were all under the same corporate roof. OnePoint is their effort to change that dynamic by making it a branded, consumer-facing experience where buyers and sellers work with one point of contact and get seamless service across the entire transaction.
Chris Kelly, who leads HomeServices, sees this move as giving them the talent and research platform needed to really execute on this vision at scale. Boero emphasized that HomeServices has built something structurally unique in having all these different service lines, and that bringing the 1000WATT team on board will help them market and leverage that advantage in ways they haven't before.
What I am seeing locally here in the Bay Area and across the East Bay is that larger brokerage operations continue to look for ways to integrate mortgage, title, and insurance services into their offering. HomeServices making this strategic hire tells me that national platforms are getting serious about marketing these integrated services directly to consumers rather than keeping them as behind-the-scenes conveniences. For my clients in Fremont and throughout the region, this could eventually mean more offers from competing brokerages that promise simplified, one-stop-shop experiences for buying or selling.
