The New Trulia In Town?
Tumlis is a startup in S.F. with a new approach to how you buy and sell condos, single-family homes, apartment buildings, land, and eventually, office buildings.
We met Tumlis co-founder Tom Horvath post-Giants game on the Embarcadero. He's prepared to go up against housing data giants Trulia and Zillow, telling us Tumlis is different because users can buy or sell a residential property all from the one-stop-shop app and website—and pinpoint the best time to do so (is paying $1M for a condo next week your smartest move? Tumlis will tell you). Tom, a CRE broker by trade, plans to eventually expand the site to do the same for office properties, and he just tacked on local titan Swift Real Estate Partners chairman Doug Abbey to its advisory board. The cool features on the residential side include direct email connectivity with brokers and the ability to set up viewing meetings on calendars.
He hopes to go national, but for now there are 35 California counties with 60,000 live listings, and another 12,000 that just went into contract. The site's hyperlocal perspective reveals buying habits in markets with specific searches by age, condition and size. He showed us that PacHeights buyers are willing to pay more to close quicker on nicer properties, preferring not to deal with rehab scenarios. On July 8 Tumlis will debut the REALizer, a patent-pending predictive analytics dashboard to agents as part of an elective, paid subscription service. The team spent a year designing and perfecting the proprietary platform, and the site curates geo-based listing data and examines the elasticity of demand in micro-markets in real-time and the near the future, so agents can advise their clients on pricing, offers and time to sell.
In the early 2000s, Tom got an itch to learn how to ski in Tahoe and ended up staying on the slopes for 10 years, keeping his hands in real estate developments and projects along the way. Spotting inefficiencies in the buyer/seller market, he teamed up with big data expert (and co-founder) Chris Butler. Now he's back in the city, living in the Marina, and joking he's the oldest there.
