DEMO: HomingCloud wants you to break up with your real-estate agent

HomingCloud is one of 70 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2010 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

The romance may have gone out of the housing market. But HomingCloud is nevertheless launching a social network for real estate that aims to play matchmaker between home sellers and potential home buyers — and, in the process, turning the middleman into a third wheel.

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HomingCloud looks to directly connect sellers and buyers in a Facebook-style network to trade messages, pictures and videos of the property in question.

Founded in 2008 by Tina Fine, who holds a Ph. D. in economics from Columbia University, the company is completely self-funded and has three additional part-time employees. Transparensee, an unrelated startup also based in New York, provides HomingCloud’s search technology.

The competition hasn’t adapted similar social features. There’s a well-trafficked housing section on online-classifieds website Craigslist that accomplishes the same function, but in a crude (if hugely popular) way, with the connections made mostly by email. Most for-sale-by-owner listing websites also connect users in similarly unsophisticated ways.

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