The idea was simple. CBS has 3 million visitors per month going to their New York site, lets build a real estate section but instead of monetizing with ads, we will actually sell property and participate in the commission. The idea seemed simple enough but of course this was going to upset a lot of people in the real estate industry. People inherently resist change and this was going to change how the real estate business worked in New York. At the time, no one had heard of Virtual Office Websites or VOW agreements and Mills developed the first one by working with the Real Estate Board Of New York and a team of attorneys to navigate the execution of the first VOW agreement in New York City. This meant that Mills could now access the MLS listings and display them on his website. Mills did this by forming a licensed real estate brokerage and registering it with the New York Department of State.

Armed with every real estate listing in Manhattan, the team completed the first iteration of it’s software application so the listings could be searched and displayed on a map. The entire operation was being funded by Mills’ company at the time LMG digitalMedia and it’s investors. CBS provided the traffic and LMG provided a real estate search and transaction platform. Once the site was launched it was time to produce a television show which was aptly named “Home” by Eye On Real Estate.

The 30 minute show aired for the first time on a Sunday afternoon at 1PM. 56,000 viewers tuned in and so many visitors hit the website that it crashed the server. From the first airing of the TV show properties, mortgages and even insurance were sold and the business model was proven.

After the CBS pilot program completed in Dec 2009 Mills, now in possession of the knowledge of what worked and what did not set out to build a more robust platform. One that would take a lot more capital to build and scale but his vision was solid. He wanted to build a system that could distribute a national aggregation of real estate listings to a national network of media partners thereby exposing the listings to hundreds of millions of monthly visitors. With millions looking, thousands would purchase and revenue would flow. This has been Mills’ plan from the outset and Distributed Real Estate is the culmination of 4 years work to mould the perfect foundation.

During the research and development phase DRE formed a partnership with a company called Home Junction International. HJI, a data aggregator and software development firm, have become the tech development and data deployment backbone of DRE. The next step before launching with media partners is to open a standalone destination site called Locate.re which will be the public facing testbed brand of DRE. Now you know the history, watch this space…