The Dark Files: So long Bouncepad

Sifting through the Inman News archives from 2000-2002, you'll quickly meet up with quite a few real estate dot-com carcasses left dead on the side of the dot-bomb road.

Anyone remember JumpHome, Home-Link or the bankruptcy that nearly brought Homes.com to its knees?

We suspect that similar stories may be coming as a number of new applications that have launched to target the industry in the last year or two are finding out that real estate is extremely difficult for technology companies in a normal market, let alone in a struggling market.

The reason is that real estate is probably the most unique industry out there. It's fragmented; there are no standard processes for marketing, finding clients and servicing property data; competitors must cooperate with each in order to get paid. Every MLS is different, which makes the property listing game a sort of Wild West to navigate from a vendor standpoint.

Over the years we've seen many bright-eyed entrepreneurs come in with online listings, online transactions, agent Web site templates. The lightbulbs came on strong but didn't last forever.

"We'll just build it and they will adapt," was the theme of many Web 1.0 companies that faded. Maybe it's not so easy.

This time, we're seeing a different sort of fading due mainly to tanking sales in many markets where businesses may not have been prepared.

We saw the first major casualty of the downturn a few weeks ago when discount brokerage company Foxtons announced it was laying off most of its workforce, filing for bankruptcy and looking for brokers to take over its existing listings.

Then last week, ZipRealty said it plans to trim staff in order to cut costs while the market continues to decline in many areas. Despite the shrinking news, Zip said it still plans to break into new markets before the year ends.

And we won't even attempt to mention all the lenders that have gone under in the subprime mortgage collapse, or related mass layoffs.

Today, we noticed a lesser-known technology company closed its doors: Bouncepad. While Bouncepad never made it to the Inman archives, company officials did come to Connect in San Francisco this summer and we've noticed them mentioned on some industry blogs. (See Future of Real Estate Marketing's write-up.)

Bouncepad offered a way for real estate agents to market listings to consumers using mobile devices. Curious that they would close their doors after our editorial team just finished researching how huge the mobile market is getting.

So long Bouncepad: Sorry it didn't work out, but you're not alone in this exit.

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