THREE Vancouver Neighbourhoods set to Explode with REW’s Simon Bray

Please tell us about yourself.

I’m from South Africa and after university, I moved to Durban, working for one of the largest property portals in Africa. Every country on the planet buys and sells real estate and they’re doing it increasingly online. Through that community, I’ve been able to travel and work all over the world. After South Africa, I worked in Western Europe for a few years and now am in Vancouver. I also worked in Asia and Latin America.

I’m a tech guy who got into real estate. But my father was a retail architect so I was plugged into real estate development throughout my childhood years. I got into software development and started a software company that happened to serve real estate professionals. From there, I got more and more into the real estate side.

Does Vancouver real estate make sense?

It’s been an eye opener for me. It’s an unusual market. In Vancouver, real estate is viewed as a financial asset first and a social asset second. But it’s not completely out of context. Every country seems to have a “Vancouver.” But it’s one of the most exaggerated markets that I have seen.

What excites you about real estate?

I’m excited about how important real estate is to society. It’s very foundational in Western societies to own the home you live in. Technology should, and increasingly is, making this whole industry more transparent and simpler. It brings more people in.

Can you tell us more about REW?

REW has been in Vancouver for years and years. It used to be a print publication insert in all of the weekly newspapers and they began a digital presence in the early 2000s. In 2010, they got more serious about building an app and portal for real estate search. Over the last 10 years, REW has established itself as BC’s favourite property platform and we do about twice as much traffic as our nearest competitor.

Is REW disruptive in the real estate market? 

I’ve thought about this question throughout my career when considering a property portal’s role in real estate. We’re creating tools to help people have a better experience. But there’s a debate about whether those tools are disruptive or not. We are just as much members of the real estate ecosystem as a realtor or a mortgage lender. A portal is just another part of the ecosystem and it’s a part that is growing. Sometimes that makes people feel uncomfortable.

But looking at every country I’ve worked in, the portal is one of the best parts of the real estate community. It represents the agents and the listings well, and gets the consumers excited. It doesn’t consolidate the market anymore than it was consolidated before. But what we’re seeing with property portals in the US is different and that may make people uncomfortable.

How is Canada’s real estate industry different?

I’ve just bought a house so I’m learning about the process as I’m in it. Canada’s real estate industry seems to have taken the best parts of the technology development on offer and resisted some of the more controversial parts. But if you’re a consumer, you might want to see those controversial parts.

For example, data access. How much is available to people on public platforms? There’s an idea that real estate professionals are entitled to more information than an average homeseeker. This debate happens in every market but Canada seems to be farther back than other markets around the world. The industry here seems hesitant to publish information that consumers are hungry for.

Why is there that hesitancy? 

There’s a vibrant real estate industry in Canada. There are boards that add a lot of value. But that’s the balancing act. I don’t think everything should be available online, for free, to everyone. That will mean a loss of a lot of the connection and human experience that people are looking for. But if you can meld that connection with the data access, you have a fantastic consumer offering.

Where it falls down in Canada is the people who are trying to provide those tools are seen as outside the industry, instead of trying to move the industry forward. At REW, we want to make the industry better by being a part of it, and not disrupting it.

How do you see the business model of REW? How does data tie into that? 

Everybody enjoys a data-rich experience. A data-rich environment makes me more confident as a consumer. We call it a home search adventure at REW. If we can inspire confidence in that process, that gets people over the uncertainty. But when it comes to making the transaction decision, those data tools are not working as you might think.

We see many companies in the US saying that real estate should be easy. You should be able to Amazon-style buy a house in one click. And there are some advantages to that lens. The other lens is that real estate transactions were never meant to be easy. They’re important, infrequent and hard-earned transactions so they can afford to be complex.

The role of a real estate platform is less about simplifying the journey and more about making it a pleasant and enjoyable one. The better these platforms get, the more time people spend in the decision making process. You’d think the better the portal, the quicker the decision, but it’s the opposite. You’re giving people more time to enjoy the process of choosing their next home.

How is REW different from the competition?

Experience is a tough thing to define. The one thing that differentiates REW is we make a real effort to build a product people will enjoy using. The other thing that differentiates us is that we try to aggregate a lot of content. We take a homeseeker-in approach: What do people want to see when they’re looking for a new home?

We add new construction homes, that aren’t in the MLS, to our platform. We have rentals, which you don’t often see listed together with homes to buy in Canada. And, of course, we have resale listings. So experience and content are the two main things that help us stand out.

How useful is REW for understanding market trends?

Not as useful as it could be! That’s something we are working on. To us, it’s pretty insightful and we’re working to share that information. We get insights into what people are looking at, which predicts the sales 6-12 weeks after the traffic we see on the site. Making that available to the market is our next step.

The hotter the market, the smaller the time between interest and sales. In March, there was only 1-2 weeks between the flurry of interest and flurry of sales. As the market stabilizes, the gap widens and we can provide insight to real estate professionals ahead of sales. We’re able to provide hyper-local trends, which is very important for real estate.

What trends are we currently seeing in the market?

After the bottom of the market fell out in March 2020, we had a huge supply and demand loss. We lost 50% of our traffic in a week. Traffic began to build up through April to June 2020, and then it really boomed through the end of 2020. We then saw a huge listing spike in the beginning of 2021. We were seeing 3000 new listings in Vancouver every week.

But the most interesting thing through covid was who the users were. There was a huge difference in demographics from pre-covid searches. There was a huge growth in much younger buyers. We’re still seeing a growing interest in this younger demographic focusing on real estate; there’s been a 200% increase in sessions by people under the age of 30. That’s a huge blip in a very short time. I think that’s an indicator for the whole market going forward.

I think one of the things driving that is higher savings. There’s nowhere to put those savings because people are staying home. They want to hedge against inflation and real estate is a way to do that. People want to get into real estate sooner. There’s also a social shift away from travel and towards owning your own place.

Another trend at the beginning of the pandemic was people who were living downtown who then moved home. So those people may now be looking to buy a home of their own.