Matthew Slutsky and Cliff Peskin are pioneers in the use of social media in the Toronto real estate marketplace.
Co-founders of the BuzzBuzzHome.com real estate web portal, they met back in high school.
The unique combination of skills is what makes the formula; Slutsky has a background in land development with luxury condo builder Diamante.
Peskin’s on the technical side. He started Nutrition in Motion, a dietary company heavily reliant on technology and sold the company after five years.
Owning several commercial properties, Peskin is passionate about real estate and passionate about technology.
With nine out of 10 people starting their search online before contacting a real estate agent, Slutsky saw the need for a unique website.
“When we launched there was literally nobody doing any listing of that sort. We list everything from highrise to lowrise, urban and suburban.”
“We set out and started what is now BuzzBuzzHome.com. We’ve turned into the largest online listing of all-new residential construction across Canada, with clients across southern Ontario, Montreal, Calgary, Vancouver and Victoria.”
And they do it all with 14 employees. They recently moved into a new office space in a renovated studio loft in Liberty Village.
The busy site updates at least a hundred listings per day.
BuzzBuzzHome helps you search, research and connect directly to new condos, new townhomes and new homes.
Using map-based results, you can search by price, city, neighbourhood or maintenance fees.
The site is completely wiki-based and any builder can go in and directly update their own listings.
“One of the real things that differentiates us is that we’re a listing of everything; what’s out there, what’s around them, what the comparables are,” says Slutsky.
Clients pay to have a listing featured on the homepage.
“So whether a client is featuring their project on our site or not, we’re listing it in an unbiased way. The same information is shown for a non-featured listing or the featured listing,” he explains.
The site has been up for almost three years now and is linked to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
“We started out as this online listing but we also started to grow our community really socially, so we’ve got a great blog,” says Slutsky.
“Then we took it a step further and started our online forum which has become a really great interactive section. It’s purchasers asking questions and it’s professionals answering questions. It’s a virtual hangout.”
