Ch-Ch-Changes!

Many of you may have noticed that I've been awfully quuiet that last few months. Just wanted to let you know, rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.

The last 18 months, I've been working with my business partners as real estate agents in Phoenix. We've been with a brokerage called Windermere (Redmondites will know them well), and have enjoyed great successes. Together, we sold nearly $10M in homes in the area, where most agents are lucky to break $1M. As you might imagine, that has taken up most of my time. In that time, I also got a girlfriend. Between a business and a woman, I've hardly had the free time to screw around writing utilities like I used to.

Then six months ago, during PDC and my sister's accident, my partners came up with a new idea. When I got back the following week, they sprung yet another change in direction on me. They wanted to start a technology-based real estate brokerage.. and "oh yeah, we're completely dependent on you to get the software off the ground."

So for the last six months, I've been working on helping my business partners get our latest venture off the ground. It's based on the concept of using technology to seemlessly integrate the buying and selling process for real estate. The existing tools around managing a brokerage are terrible, and the tools around managing an agent's business are far worse. So we wanted to build a toolset that not only helped us manage our client load internally, but extended many of those tools directly to our clients. The end result is a really cool business model in which we can save our clients thousands of dollars, all while handling far more clients with far fewer agents.

I was really excited to dive into the project, because we're able to use the absolute latest technologies available. The platforms used in real estate software design are so archaic it's almost laughable. We'll be able to leverage the types of technologies typically seen in massive start-ups for a fraction of the price, which is a lot of fun for me. And so many new technologies are on the horizon, it will be a lot of fun to experiment with them to see how to put them to use to benefit this industry.

We paid a big chunk of change to have a professional firm craft our image, branding, and website design. A couple weeks ago, we got a name. Last week, we got our logo and tagline. Over the next several weeks, we'll be finalizing our design as we wrap up the first version of the platform. We're wrapping up our first round of investment now (contact me if you want a piece of the action), and should be getting into our first real office soon.

So my new company's name is Homentum™, and we're on track to launch our service for the Phoenix area in late March, early April. We're still getting the servers set up, but we should have a website up before then.

So what does that mean for Interscape? Well, you might have noticed that 90% of the site has been broken for quite some time now. We shut down our component development a long time ago, but never got around to taking all the stuff down. Interscape will be re-focusing on building Microsoft-related communities, such as LonghornBlogs.com. All references to ASP.NET components will be taken off InterscapeUSA.com, and all downloads will be moved to my new personal website instead. That should happen about the same time as our launch.

I'm really excited about this new venture. It's our first real start-up, and we've put a lot of time into building a business model that will make serious money. The margins are quie a bit higher than my days of selling scrollable DataGrids at $20 a pop. We have big plans for the future, and I'm looking forward to many exciting days ahead.

Hope all is well with you guys. I'm excited to get back into the swing of things.

-Robert