Site’s Home Page Is All About Homes

You can’t touch the inlaid tile or open the cabinets. You can’t jiggle the doorknobs or run the hot water.

But Internet mavens are betting that you’ll look for a home--probably the most expensive, most complicated purchase of your life--over the Web, window shopping before you make the trip out to see the Realtor.

And one of the most likely places you’ll do that is at the for-now undisputed king of real estate Web sites, Homestore.com--the Thousand Oaks-based Internet company and home to a family of sites taking buyers through every step of the life of their home.

Homestore--which links to Realtor.com, Homebuilder.com and Springstreet.com--is the first home-related site to make a major push to the public with an ambitious ad campaign, a 90-second cinematic saga about a Cro-Magnon family’s quest for a cave to call its own. The spot is due to run on prime-time television at least through late January.

The family of sites gets nearly four times as many hits as its nearest competitor--Microsoft’s HomeAdvisor.com--and has longer average visits than every other real estate site, according to NetRatings, an Internet ratings service.

It also has the head start: four years in existence--eons in the Internet world--and a close, exclusive relationship with the National Assn. of Realtors that helps it nab 90% of the country’s real estate listings.

“That’s the primary reason they’re doing well. They got in earlier than most,” said Peggy O’Neill, an analyst

at NetRatings. “The other is that they’ve got a good site, and they’ve built up and kept improving it.”

To visit the Thousand Oaks offices of Homestore is to feel that the wacky Silicon Valley mentality has descended on this little corner of the world.

There’s an employee in caveman garb working on his computer in the lobby--a tribute to the new multimillion-dollar ad campaign. And there’s a “beach”--a corner of sand and bikini-clad Barbie dolls tucked into the corner.

But as the company has grown, the game room has become office space and hallway corners were turned into conference rooms.

And last week, executives took a trip across the country to begin an all-out push for a second public offering, seeking capital that will give their until-recently soaring stock price a bumpy ride but will bring hundreds of millions to the company for expansion.

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Like many Internet companies, they’re not actually making money yet.

Homestore makes what it does by having Realtors pay extra to upgrade their free listings with more information. In exchange for listings, the Realtors association gets a small piece of the company and assured free listings.

The company is the brainchild of chairman Stuart Wolff, a former scientist at Bell Labs in New Jersey who saw a chance to jump into the business world after a stint at TCI in Denver. He’s an intense businessman--with a calendar planned to the minute--who lives in Thousand Oaks for the family life but finds himself constantly jetting off on business.

“People would say, ‘You’re such a genius for thinking of this,’ ” he said. “But, I wasn’t the only one to think of it. We just survived.”

The company--and analysts--say that real estate is ideally suited to the Internet. People don’t buy homes often enough to get real expertise: They need help even to find a real estate agent. Plus, using the Web saves buyers and Realtors time. If they can rule out a house without even visiting, the length of a home search will be drastically shortened.

Since its beginning, the company has expanded its outlook to every aspect of owning a home.

“People really want to learn every aspect of where they live,” said Jeff Charney, vice president of marketing. “It’s about making your house your home. We’re not just buying and selling. We’re also about redecorating and remodeling.” In addition, the Springstreet.com site is targeted at apartment seekers.

But some of Homestore’s rivals and analysts say that the emphasis on who has the biggest list can be misleading and that Homestore’s competitors eventually will catch up.

“The lists have driven a lot,” said Seema Williams, an analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass. “This first stop in getting consumer attention is the listings. But it’s a little too early to tell just how it’s working.”

In other words, the site gets the eyes. But what happens if the listings don’t offer enough information? Will Web users be inclined to track down the Realtor?

Microsoft’s HomeAdvisor, Homestore’s closest rival, claims to have listings from half of the country’s 90,000 realty agencies and says that number is constantly growing.

It further claims that its free listings--which include much of the information Homestore asks Realtors to pay for--are more useful to visitors.

“Most Realtors don’t choose to pay the hundreds of dollars [to Homestore],” said Ian Morris, group product manager for HomeAdvisor. “A consumer browsing online could send an e-mail to any one of our listings. At Homestore, they’d have to get offline and call.”

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Be that as it may, Homestore officials say they have Realtors on their side. And what flexibility they may lose is made up for by the numbers.

And Homestore is growing. It went from about 30 employees three years ago to 1,200 today. And the hiring continues.

“This is all about focus and commitment,” said Wolff. “People who succeed have those traits. That’s how you get into the playoffs. And now success is our biggest challenge. We can’t take it for granted.”