Weekly. Wire. Works.
The (mostly) unredacted history of REW.
At the beginning of our real estate adventure, REW (formerly Real Estate Weekly) was the largest real estate print publication in Western Canada, with over 500 000 copies distributed door to door.
Our parent company (Glacier) recognized the need to shift from being a primarily print-based media company to a more integrated media business for real estate. In 2011, they brought together a group of experienced individuals in the real estate tech industry to help develop a strategy and build the technology: Ian Martin, the now-legendary Allen Moon, and an Australian consultancy group, Classified Ad Ventures, led by well-known Proptech veteran, Simon Baker.
Rather than build another classified site that complemented the print offering, their goal was to build a better search experience for Greater Vancouver homeseekers that combined resale search with new home projects, an agent directory and new listing property alerts, all wrapped up with local real estate news - an offering that had never been done before in the local market.
At the same time, they wanted to provide a platform for real estate agents and developers to advertise their brands and generate leads. This was not an easy undertaking. In fact, it was probably a little crazy - and took significant resources. With the ability to only convert one broker at a time, we targeted the top 150 brokerages in the hope that we could build enough critical mass for the rest of the market to follow. In October 2011, after eight months of development, REW launched the first prototype of REW.ca. It was about half a success.
Rebuilding Rome in a day. As you do.
Even with the promise of free advertising and marketing to all local brokers and agents, we captured barely more than 50% of the market’s listings. And while the initial launch gave us a boost of traffic, the momentum quickly subsided, and we found it difficult to expand beyond the initial traffic growth. Assumptions around brand awareness campaigns, leveraging audience reach from Glacier’s community sites and print publications didn’t translate into reality.
Eight months after launching REW.ca, with a limited budget and timeframe, we made the decision to rebuild the entire platform with our own development team. It was a late-night decision. And there may have been tears involved.
We pivoted our product focus to three key areas that we believed would help us win: SEO-first product development, a solid consumer search experience, and speed. This meant not only being the fastest site, but also the fastest to publish new listings.
In the summer of 2012, we assembled a small yet mighty team of two developers and a single SEO specialist. We gave them food, sparkling water and unlimited playlists, and by the end of September that year, we had launched a faster, more responsive and SEO-optimized site.
Allen with swag. The only surviving image of this era.
Going for brokers.
Within six months, traffic had grown 50%. By month eight, we had grown 100%. At the end of a full year, site visits had jumped by more than 360% - with no signs of slowing down. By mid 2015, we had reached the key milestone of 1 million visits in a single month. But an even greater accomplishment was signing up 98% of all brokers - the first and only portal to ever accomplish this.
2015. The wonder years.
Moving in.
After seeing this growth, we saw the need to expand and take our platform to markets outside of BC. We set our sights on Toronto, the largest market in Canada. In 2017, after a year in development, REW launched in the Greater Toronto area with 75% of the top 50 brokers on the site.
The company also rebranded as “Real Estate Wire” that same year, complete with new logo, brand value proposition, mission and vision. In 2018, REW entered into an agreement with BC’s Assessment Authority and became the first real estate portal to display property data and sales history for over 1.4 million residential properties in British Columbia (BC).
The launch brought much attention (good and bad), but ultimately positioned REW as the leading real estate search platform in BC.
The joy is in the journey.
In the days since, the platform has launched other key products that have helped shape and define REW as a leading real estate portal, including agent recommendations (launched in 2019) and our expansion into rentals and mortgages (2020).
At 11:11am on the 1st of June 2021 (Day ONE), we became Real Estate Works. But it’s perhaps our realization that real estate is not, in fact, about real estate that has been the most powerful insight of our journey thus far.
Real estate is about people. And no matter how treacherous the waters they have to travel may seem, their real estate journeys should remain one of the great adventures of their lives.
We’re simply here to help guide them.
