Photo of Richard Swedlow by Peter Andrew Bosch/Miami Herald
By Nancy Dahlberg / ndahlberg@MiamiHerald.com
The success of Condo.com, an online marketplace, can be attributed in part to that old real estate adage: location, location, location.
Condo.com was started by Internet entrepreneur Richard Swerdlow, and it is part of eRealEstate Holdings, which also owns Condos.com, Houses.com, Property.com, Properties.com and Location.com. But acquiring those valuable Internet domains is only part of this entrepreneurial story.
Swerdlow was a public finance lawyer at Greenberg Traurig with an interest in outer space ventures in the early ’90s when the entrepreneurial bug bit. In 1993, he and a partner founded Everything Wireless. “With a $15,000 investment, we built what became the largest online retailer and cataloger for cellphones and accessories,” he said. They grew it to about $100 million in revenue and sold it to a unit of Federated Department Stores in 2000.
Then Swerdlow went to work in the family business — his father is well-known South Florida developer Michael Swerdlow — and helped develop data centers that were popular at the time. When the market turned and condos became hot, he began working on those projects, including a new condo development in Daytona Beach.
Remember 2005 when people were camping out for pre-construction condos? Swerdlow and a partner were driving back and forth from Daytona on Interstate 95, passing billboard after billboard hawking pre-construction condos. “We said to ourselves, ‘Something bad is going to happen — there is going to be a global oversupply. Why don’t we create an online marketplace that can generate liquidity in the condo space?’ ” Swerdlow said.
US Condo Exchange, the first iteration of what would later become Condo.com, launched in 2006.
The idea behind the original site was that condos were trading almost like a commodity, thus the name. The online marketplace would make money from developers’ advertising, but there was a problem with that business model.
“We got to a point where we couldn’t scale the business model,” Swerdlow said. “We needed a lot of bodies on the phone to make sales calls. [Developers] would only buy on credit, so we ran up receivables, and we got hit when the market fell out.”
But in 2007, Swerdlow began talking to the investors behind Hotels.com about investing in his company. They encouraged him to buy the domain names Condo.com and Condos.com. The investment deal fell apart but Condo.com and Condos.com, while expensive, were still available. “My wife said ‘you only regret the things you don’t do so let’s go all in — if you really want to be the online condo guy, you need to have Condo.com,’ ” Swerdlow recalled. “We bought those domains.”
Condo.com was generating a lot of traffic, yet condos at the time accounted for 10 percent of the overall housing stock. That means there were a lot of single-family homes — so eRealEstate Holdings bought Houses.com. Later the company bought Property.com and Properties.com.