Culling hard-to-find info on foreclosed properties has been a boon for this online data services company
Sean McFadden, Journal Staff
Monday, November 15, 2004
FRAMINGHAM — Sheila Farragher-Gemma and Jeremy Shapiro know
full well that for those who’ve fallen on hard times
— fearing the destruction of their credit and possible loss
of their home — there’s no uglier word than
“foreclosure.”
And as co-founders of a Framingham-based
online data subscription service called ForeclosuresMass.com, it
means frequently contending with the notion that your line of
work is about as welcome as a bad case of the flu — or
worse.
“There are a handful of industries out
there where it’s very hard to give it a positive
spin,” says Shapiro, 24. “Working with foreclosures
is definitely one of them.”
To members of the real estate community eager
to take some of the legwork out of the arduous process of
collecting information about foreclosed properties in this state,
the Web site is less heartache, more bliss.
* Next 37 17 investors only!
As licensed Realtors, Shapiro and
Farragher-Gemma, 37, say they were inspired by their own
experience of chasing foreclosures — endless hours, they
say, spent at the Registry of Deeds obtaining and photocopying
documents, then putting the information into a database.
“There was a need to have something
centralized like this, where virtually with the click of a mouse,
you can download everything you need,” says
Farragher-Gemma.
For $19.95 per month for a single
county’s listings, subscribers obtain a wealth of
information from Massachusetts’ 14 counties, such as the
legal reference number for the foreclosure, filing date, the
bank, the homeowner and address, auction and tax records
information.
Shapiro says that in the past 60 days alone,
1,390 Massachusetts foreclosures have been added to the site. The
company’s 30-member staff uses a variety of state, public
and digital sources to cultivate the 150 to 200 new listings that
appear on the site each week.
“One of the reasons that they are
successful is that their customers can go to one source for the
information,” says the company’s banking
representative, Leslie Joannides-Burgos, vice president and
branch manager of Citizens Bank at Newton Center.
“It’s the simplicity of it. In the past, collecting
foreclosure information was very labor-intensive.”
After spending months developing the Web site
— the original version of which was designed entirely by
Shapiro, who has a background in database development —
they officially launched it in June 2003. In a testament to their
ability to mine gold from a market need, the company’s
business is said to have doubled every quarter since it started,
with revenue between $2 million and $3 million for 2003, and
projected between $5 million and $7 million for this year. Since
the site’s launch, the company has signed up about 1,000
subscribers — 75 percent of which are real estate
investors.
“What we wanted to do was just focus on
Massachusetts, and be the best in Massachusetts, rather than
trying to focus on the entire country,” says
Farragher-Gemma.
Perhaps more unusual for a dot-com, Shapiro
says the venture has been entirely self-funded, and that an
abundance of advance subscriptions before the site was even fully
functional enabled them to easily recoup an initial investment of
several thousands of dollars in startup fees.
In fact, the biggest issue confronting
Farragher-Gemma and Shapiro right now, they say, is one of
perception: how best to counteract the impression that those who
work this market are, as Farragher-Gemma puts it, “like the
birds that hover around in the desert waiting for the person to
die.”
Both she and Shapiro contend that the site has
actually broadened the choices for both investors and embattled
homeowners, who instead of receiving perhaps a single offer to
refinance may now receive six — thereby helping them to
avert that dreaded “black mark” on their credit
report that comes with foreclosure.
“What we’re trying to do is put
them in touch with folks who are going to help them with that.
They can help them sell their property, move on, get a new lease
on life,” says Farragher-Gemma.
Jeremy Cyrier, owner of Arlington real estate
firm Mansard Properties LLC and a broker with Re/Max Destiny of
Cambridge, says that using ForeclosuresMass.com saves time and
money.
“I’m spending about $300 a year on
the service,” he says. “I was previously paying an
employee about $300 a month to track that information. So I get
all the information for about a twelfth of the cost.”
