HomeLight is a real estate technology company that offers products and services to connect top real estate agents with active buyers and sellers, and improve the real estate transaction for everyone involved. Consumers can browse and choose from HomeLight’s database of the top agents across the U.S., then with their agent’s help, use HomeLight products to simplify the purchase and/or sale of their home.
HomeLight was not a Narrative Bent client — because Narrative Bent didn’t exist yet. However, the principal members of the Narrative Bent team (Matthew Proctor, Caroline Feeney, Matt McGee, and Brooke Lazor) led Content & SEO in-house at HomeLight from 2016 to 2023 to achieve these results.
HomeLight entered the crowded proptech space in 2012, positioning itself as an alternative to the likes of Zillow, Realtor.com, Redfin and other real estate portals where buyers and sellers could find and be matched with top real estate agents.
In its early years, HomeLight’s marketing relied on paid advertising. After several years of slow but steady growth, the company decided to reach buyers and sellers via content marketing and SEO––areas where its competitors already had nearly a decade’s head start.
Our strategy always begins with customer and market research.
In HomeLight’s case, our first customers were those with the highest intent to transact: motivated sellers and motivated buyers. We talked to customers and agents to better understand the pain they went through and then we used search data to map out a full customer journey. We’d eventually apply the same principles to real estate agents on the B2B side as the business’ needs evolved.
Once we understood all that, we implemented a 3-pronged content marketing strategy:
1. We worked from the bottom of the funnel up.
We started by targeting pain points at the "Zero Moment of Truth"—when a homeowner showed the highest intent to sell their house. We published high-quality, expert-led articles that answered common questions like "how to sell a house," "why should I use a real estate agent," and more. We developed a programmatic page strategy that included pages like “top real estate agents in [city]” and built consumer tools like a Home Value Estimator and a Net Proceeds Calculator, among others.
We ran PR & link-building campaigns to drive credible, contextual, and authoritative links to the pages we were producing. Our approach included a quarterly “Top Agent Insights Report,” with original data from a national survey of more than 1,000 top agents. Over the years, HomeLight earned thousands of national, local, and industry trade press mentions and links.
2. We scaled up as monthly revenue met and surpassed the cost of production.
We held everything we produced to a high standard of excellence. This is incredibly important for what Google calls “Your Money or Your Life” topics like real estate and finance.
Over several years, we scaled up blog post production until we were on par with some of the most prominent real estate publishers. We also rolled out additional programmatic page types to better serve HomeLight customers and capture pockets of search demand in the real estate market.
3. Tied every action back to revenue
We assigned a monetary value to everything we were doing and made sure that we had full-funnel visibility on key metrics like
This unwavering dedication to high-quality content that solves customer pain points, combined with our laser-like focus on connecting that content to leads and revenue (not just rankings and traffic), drove the growth that turned HomeLight into a proptech “Unicorn” startup.
The U.S. Housing Market has taken a beating since the mortgage interest rate hikes in 2022 but Content & SEO have helped buoy HomeLight against the seething proptech market. Thanks to the 300K+ monthly organic search visitors HomeLight still gets for free (according to semRush), they can potentially reduce spend in other areas to maintain an advantage over their competitors.
It hasn’t been an easy road, but the company continues to help buyers and sellers across the nation find top real estate agents and serve them with new and innovative products like Buy Before You Sell.
“I'm not sure where our SEO & Content program would be without Matthew and his team. He came in at the beginning, rolled up his sleeves, and built one of our most profitable enduring assets and a world-class content team for us.”
We blend storytelling, strategy, and data to help you build influence and grow your business through content marketing.
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