The best way to get your business noticed is to think differently, execute fiercely and deliver what your customers need. If you dive into your customers’ thoughts with precision, deliver a unique value proposition with the best possible product, and commit to delivering innovation to the end customer – whether it be a consumer or business – recognition will follow. My father taught me this before I even started my career, and I’ve applied it ever since – from my first venture at real-estate tech company Dotloop, to D. Alexander, my latest venture in the hospitality industry.
My father was a master-craftsman and contractor with a small business in residential home building, so my brother and I grew up in and around the industry. Thanks to my father’s example, we became obsessed with details from a young age – he was always on a mission to deliver the highest level of quality, emphasizing meticulousness, process, and productivity in every aspect of his work. When my brother later became a real estate agent himself, he was thus quick to recognize the inefficiencies throughout the transaction process. When he shared his vision to bring the real estate transaction online in one seamless solution, I immediately knew I had to join him on the journey. We set out to change the way that real estate deals get done, officially launching the venture in 2009.
Our obsession with the customer experience and determination to deliver the best possible solution paid off. We quickly became the fastest growing brand in the industry, and were acquired by Zillow in 2015 – just six years after launch. When I left the company in 2019 to launch D. Alexander, the majority of all residential real estate transactions in the United States were done through the Dotloop platform. The acquisition didn’t happen by chance or luck. We had remained dogged in our determination to deepen our market knowledge, understand our customers’ shifting needs, and deliver new innovations to increase our value proposition. The more we led with a people-first mindset, the stronger our product became, and the more we brought unique value to all parties in the real estate process.
Most recently, I founded D. Alexander – a new company that's reinventing notions of hospitality and home, in destination-first markets. Once again, the idea was born from personal experience and precise data. When I’d had the opportunity to work remotely a few years back, I travelled habitually, and needed access to great homes, with consistent standards and the perks of a shared ownership model. All existing rental platforms worked through independent hosts, and couldn’t deliver that kind of hotel-quality experience from home-to-home.
The market data revealed I wasn’t alone. Consumers increasingly wanted a consistent and flexible hospitality experience, in adventurous, non-traditional locations. So, after analyzing the needs of group destination seekers and forecasting the market’s evolution, I launched D. Alexander as the first owned and operated home hospitality company. Our mission as a brand was focused on driveable, isolated locations in stunning destinations like Sedona and the Great Smoky Mountains.
We launched in 2019 with a keen understanding of our customers’ needs, and immediately saw rapid growth. Some of the biggest and brightest industry investors already took note – like Scott Shatford of AirDNA, and Doug Brien and Colin Wiel of Starwood Waypoint Homes. Then, the coronavirus pandemic hit. And though the crisis presented a major challenge to our new brand and the hospitality industry as a whole, I believed that an innovative, customer-first product would carry us through if we evolved at the pace of consumers’ new needs. We went back to the rapidly shifting data, and quickly launched Destination Isolation, a fresh product offering that catered to a new demand for safe, isolated homes to escape to for extended periods of time.
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Steve Niehaus, MBA, CBI
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