How HousingWire Defines Who It Wants to Reach
Whatever industry you’re in, there’s probably a specialist media outlet that you consult on a regular basis. You’re familiar with what they write, but what does that publication look like on the inside? How do they define you, their audience? And what is it you should know to improve the likelihood that they’ll highlight your company?
As President of HW Media, Diego Sanchez has answers to all of these questions for one of the most important publications in the housing industry, HousingWire. Housing is such a big topic and growing even bigger given the current affordability crisis. So Diego could go for a large, broad audience. But that’s not what HousingWire is doing at all.
Diego and his team care most about a group of industry leaders and insiders that, if put in one place, would constitute a mid-sized US city. This approach is targeted, thoughtful, and may be a model for how to break through an incredibly noisy information environment.
Lionel Foster: Diego, welcome to Catalyst. Thanks for joining us.
Diego Sanchez: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. It’s a real honor and a pleasure.
Lionel Foster: So as a venture capitalist, I try to be honest: we’re known for our key performance indicators, so I want to set one at the top.
My goal for our conversation is for a lot of the folks who are not already into housing as much as you and I are to leave a little more interested, a little more excited, maybe a little more open to what you spend your life working on.
So how’s that for a goal?
Diego Sanchez: I think that makes a lot of sense.
And actually, before I joined HousingWire almost eight years ago, I had nothing to do with the housing industry. I was in B2C media.
So I’ve really learned to love and appreciate housing over the past seven-plus years. It’s actually a super interesting vertical and part of our economy from so many different perspectives.
You’ve got interesting companies, you’ve got disruption, you’ve got some real characters that are executives of these different companies.
You’ve got government regulation, you’ve got some historical issues of inequity. There’s so much to cover—politics.
So in terms of business media, which I thought was going to be boring before I joined HousingWire, it’s really anything but housing.
Lionel Foster: All right, well that’s a great place to start. So paint us a picture.
Who was Diego pre-HousingWire? What were you doing? What were you into?
Diego Sanchez: Sure. So I spent a couple of years in investment banking at Credit Suisse, focused on financing leveraged buyouts. I learned a ton in that role and really built out the financial and accounting aspects of my toolbox.
But I didn’t enjoy the hierarchical nature of investment banking. And when I looked at folks who were more towards the top, I didn’t really want their job.
I think I was much more entrepreneurial and much more interested in media and technology.
So from investment banking, I went to work for a couple of years at Microsoft, which was an incredible opportunity to switch from the financial world to the tech and media world.
I actually worked for the division that operates MSN and Bing and other online efforts.
Lionel Foster: It sounds like you chose that division intentionally. That wasn’t just happenstance that you landed there.
Diego Sanchez: Absolutely intentional. There was a really interesting team that a friend of mine from business school was on that was making a lot of buy, build, partner decisions in the digital space related to MSN and search.
So it was just a great team to be on and to put some of the banking skills that I had to use, but also to really push into business development and partnership development over those couple of years.
And then from Microsoft, I moved into media.
I was at Travelzoo, which is a travel publisher. I was at Rodale, which published Men’s Health, Women’s Health, and other healthy lifestyle titles before they were acquired by Hearst.
And then I spent a year running an ad tech company before joining HousingWire.
So I’ve just been focused ever since I left banking on more and more responsibility and scope at media companies, and I love the tech flavor.
HousingWire—and we can talk about this more—for a media company of 60-plus people, we have a very capable and decently sized technology team. We handle our own product development, we handle our own engineering.
So I’m still really interested in that intersection of media and technology. I think it’s a real differentiator for a company like ours to be very capable when it comes to product development.
Lionel Foster: I definitely want to get into that and learn more about why you need such a capable technology team and what you’re building. But underlying that is who your audience is.
So who is your audience? How do you define it, and how do you define the total addressable market?
Because I see a little bit of tension—if you define your audience too broadly, you get people who are harder to reach and less likely to spend, but if you make it too small—so how do you think about that?
Diego Sanchez: Yeah, it’s a great question, and we’ve thought about it a lot. We are not focused on the home buyer or the home seller or somebody who thinks about real estate as a hobby.
Maybe they’re interested in a vacation property, maybe they’ve done some fix-and-flip or some other real estate investing—that’s not our core audience.
Although we do have folks from those segments who will visit HousingWire and consume our content and data. We are very primarily focused on housing professionals.
A lot of what we do and what we sell in terms of subscriptions and event tickets is really focused on the executive—either from a real estate brokerage or a mortgage lender, or a title company, or an appraisal and valuation firm, or a home builder. Or a top producer, like a top-producing real estate agent or loan originator.
Those are the folks we spend most of our time thinking about when we’re developing content and pushing into data journalism and analytics.
Those are the folks we’re trying to speak to and develop relationships with.
Lionel Foster: That makes all the sense in the world to me. That market—how big is it? High six figures? Eight figures?
Diego Sanchez: Great question.
If you think about housing professionals overall—and I’m talking about single-family residential—we don’t do a lot in multifamily, and we don’t really touch commercial real estate.
There are approximately 1.5 to 2 million real estate agents; 200,000 to 300,000 active loan originators; probably 50,000 to 75,000 title agents; about that many appraisers; and 40,000 to 50,000 custom home builders.
So if you look at housing professionals and the tech companies that serve them, you’re probably looking at a total addressable market of about 2.5 million people.
But if you hone in on executives and top producers, it’s probably one-tenth of that—200,000 to 250,000.
We’re really focused on that top 10% of housing professionals who are growing companies or are top producers in their markets.
Lionel Foster: So about a quarter of a million people—that’s your sweet spot.
That’s like a small to mid-size city.
Diego Sanchez: Yeah, and there’s quite a bit that we can sell them.
If we penetrate that 200,000 to 250,000 by five to 10% with our premium products—subscriptions, events like The Gathering with ticket prices from $1,000 to $3,000. When you get those folks to meaningfully participate, it’s a pretty good opportunity.
We like to think of ourselves as on the journey to becoming the Bloomberg of housing.
If you think about Bloomberg, they serve news through Bloomberg Media, but their goal is to convert a portion of that audience into terminal subscribers paying $20,000 to $30,000 per year.
We don’t have that price point yet, but we’re building toward that—where executives and top producers think of us as their terminal for housing.
Lionel Foster: This is cool, because you’re very clear-eyed about your audience.
On the other end of the spectrum, I found out Zillow has a celebrity housing reporter.
It’s not just housing. It’s housing intersecting with celebrity culture.
Which makes sense, but it surprised me.
Diego Sanchez: It’s super smart for them.
If you think about their business model, they’re trying to attract all the eyeballs of people interested in housing in any way.
Looking at celebrity homes—the lifestyle of the rich and famous—that gets people excited about real estate. It’s aspirational.
It makes complete sense for Zillow. It wouldn’t make sense for us.
Lionel Foster: So tell me more about the business, the various components you’re building toward being the Bloomberg for housing. What do the different parts of the business look like today?
Diego Sanchez: Yeah, so we’ve got a couple different business lines.
When I joined, we were 90% advertising-based, and over the past almost eight years, we have added quite a bit of subscription revenue and event revenue. Now we’re at the point where we still have a very healthy advertising business, but it’s less than half of our overall revenue.
Events have become a very significant part of our revenue. We do five events every year that are very focused on the executive.
Three of those are one-day summits, and two of those are multi-day conferences.
That event business is probably 40% attendee revenue and 60% sponsorship revenue. We like that balance. We really like that balance of having some sponsor support, which is important, but also really wanting our attendees to see the value and pay for that value. So events have become important for us.
The other big component of our revenue picture now is two subscription products.
We have a subscription called Altos, which is very focused on the real estate professional, tip of the spear. What Altos does is it helps that real estate professional become an expert on their local housing market data and then share that expertise in order to build their sphere.
So that is the Altos subscription.
Then we have the HousingWire subscription, which we’re kind of building into that Bloomberg of housing. The HousingWire subscription gives you access to all the content on HousingWire.com, and it also gives you discounts on our events and some special perks at our events.
Then it gives you access to something that we recently launched that I definitely want to talk more about: HousingWire Intelligence.
Right now, it is a desktop application experience where you can visualize all sorts of data. Some of it is proprietary to HousingWire, some of it is public that we’re pulling in, and some of it we acquire through partnership.
But again, it’s that terminal dashboard-type experience that we want housing executives and top producers to come to multiple times per day to better understand the national, regional, and local housing market.
Lionel Foster: One question we have to think about at Camber Creek when we talk to a lot of startups is, given the capabilities of generative AI and how many people have access to it, where is the real differentiation?
So talk me through that. With HousingWire Intelligence, I imagine that’s been the subject of a number of conversations internally.
Diego Sanchez: Yeah, absolutely.
I think AI is a threat, but it’s also a huge opportunity, and we have been very forward in integrating AI into our workflows and into our products.
This HousingWire Intelligence product that we just recently launched as part of the HousingWire subscription actually has AI-enabled analysis built into the product.
You may look at a chart and see the visualization and the data, but what does it mean? We’re actually incorporating AI that has been trained on our analysts and our content and the way we think about housing market data.
That AI assistant can provide analysis on the data and visualization that you’re seeing. So we’ve incorporated that into our products, and I think that’s important.
I also think it’s important to recognize that AI has capabilities to help with analysis and help acquire data, but it can’t really tell you what it all means and guide you on how you should integrate that into your business decisions.
For us, our opportunity is to be that guide as we go deeper and deeper into data journalism and analysis. We want to be that guide for the busy executive who maybe doesn’t have time to train and spend time with an AI assistant all day.
We can help provide that shortcut so they can go back to what they need to do, which is grow their business. So the way I think about AI is it’s superpowering our team. It is enabling us to grow revenue and grow the company without growing the team.
But at this point, it’s not replacing people. It’s really just enabling them and enabling us to be a much better guide to our audience.
Lionel Foster: Yeah, that makes sense.
So as I think about that quarter of a million people who make up the metaphorical capital of the HousingWire universe, perhaps the ideal for you would be: You have these touchpoints, you see what they’re doing on your digital properties and at your in-person events, but you can also augment that with data about how they show up elsewhere—what other publications they’re looking at—to get a feel for what they might be interested in and how to build the relationship further.
One, am I describing that correctly? And two, how close are you to that ideal where you have a 360-degree view of your target customer?
Diego Sanchez: You are absolutely correct in describing the ideal scenario, and we’re building toward that.
We’re probably 50–60% of the way there.
We have a very good understanding of who our user personas are, and we’re building a better understanding of their journey through our digital properties and what causes them to convert.
I would say what’s more nascent is understanding what else they’re doing.
We get at that through surveys, and we can get at it through some vendors who help us build a more complete picture of someone’s profile.
But that’s probably more nascent for us.
We are spending a ton of time right now thinking about HousingWire Intelligence and how we’re going to get people on that journey to what will be a $3,000 to $5,000 per year subscription, which not everybody can do.
It takes a pretty long consideration period to get someone to make that kind of decision.
We’re going to be a lot better at understanding our customer and what causes them to convert in the next six months. We’re spending a lot of time on that right now.
Lionel Foster: That makes sense.
Coming into this conversation, I thought some of the trade-offs you would have to think about were around communication channels—print, digital, podcasts, video, events.
But it sounds like the trade-offs are even more complicated than that. You’ve got HousingWire Intelligence, and you’ve got your editorial team producing content every day. Are those two buckets in competition with each other?
Do you have moments where you think, we could really use another reporter in this subcategory, but should we spend that on building HousingWire Intelligence instead?
Diego Sanchez: It’s a great question. In the past, we have had to make trade-offs like that because we’re still lean—60-plus people—and we’re not venture-backed. We’re private equity-backed. They want to see cash flow, so we can’t scale using other people’s money. We have to be profitable if we want to invest in growth.
Fortunately, we’ve been very profitable, and we have a supportive board that lets us invest a lot of that profitability back into growth. Up until relatively recently, before we launched HousingWire Intelligence and clarified our four user personas, there were trade-offs like that.
Now that we’ve launched Intelligence and honed in on the four personas we’re going deep with, there are fewer trade-offs. The editorial team is tasked with creating content that helps those personas make better decisions faster.
If we need to hire a reporter, it’s because there’s a vertical that will help drive more subscribers. That decision is in sync with how we think about investing in our technology team and our products. It’s all about making sure those four personas move farther down the funnel and eventually convert to a subscription. So it feels like we’re much more in alignment now, and the trade-offs are fewer.
Lionel Foster: One of the themes we see on Catalyst is that the type of funding behind your business determines a lot. You mentioned you’re private equity-backed, which means focus on cash flow, versus venture-backed where growth comes first. Another thing you said that stood out was that reaching clarity on the four user personas answered many other questions. What are those personas, and how did you land on them? That seems like a difficult and possibly controversial process.
Diego Sanchez: Absolutely controversial internally.
If you think about a journalist, they want to speak to the widest audience possible. When you ask them to hone in on 200,000 to 250,000 people, it goes against their natural inclination. So there’s definitely a process we go through. We look for the right reporters—those who get excited about being a guide to a specific audience rather than broadcasting to everyone. There are reporters who want to go deep with a smaller audience, and we’ve found those people across our newsroom.
The four user personas: The first is the C-suite executive across the residential real estate ecosystem—CEO of a brokerage, COO of a mortgage lender, CMO of a title company.
The second is a mortgage or capital markets executive—someone focused on data to make lending and investment decisions.
The third is the home builder.
We recently acquired The Builder’s Daily, which had built an incredible audience of senior homebuilding executives.
There are 40,000 to 50,000 custom home builders in the U.S., and they need to be immersed in data to make decisions about where and how to build.
They’re a great audience and willing to spend on events and data.
The fourth persona is the top producer—top real estate agents and top loan originators.
They have slightly different paths, but we think of them together.
We’re all in on those four personas.
Lionel Foster: Nice.
Diego Sanchez: And then just to finish answering your question, it was not an easy process to develop those personas.
We had internal people working on it, and we’ve actually been partnered with an external consultant in the latter phase of really honing in on these personas because we just wanted to get it right.
We’re not shy about reaching out for expertise. We’ve done it a couple of times with a brand agency, and this is with a value creation consultant that specializes in subscription businesses.
They’ve been very helpful in supplementing our internal efforts to build out these personas and then to help us think through the user journeys for those personas.
Lionel Foster: How long did that process take?
Diego Sanchez: Gosh, it’s been six months.
Lionel Foster: That’s actually faster than I anticipated.
Diego Sanchez: Yeah. But this project stands on a lot of foundational work that has happened beforehand, including a couple of engagements with a really good brand agency who helped us think through our audience and start to hone in on the personas that make the most sense.
This last six months has been taking a lot of that work to the finish line.
We just didn’t take it to the finish line earlier because we were still building. We were still building HousingWire Intelligence. It’s been a year-plus-long effort, so this was the right time to finish up that work.
Lionel Foster: So there was a process of reaching alignment, as much as might be possible internally, about who those four user personas were.
I want to go to the perspective of someone pitching a story to HousingWire. “Hey, our company’s great,” or in the case of a VC firm, “our portfolio company is great. You need to write about them. Why aren’t you writing about them now? And this is what you should write.”
Do you think that, in general, the groups pitching to you understand those four personas as well as they should?
Diego Sanchez: I would doubt that. We just wrapped up fairly recently the persona work, and the user journey work is ongoing, so it will take some time to help all of the folks that pitch stories to us understand.
In terms of business publications, B2B publications in particular, we’re a little bit different. Our newsroom is completely independent of the business, so our editor-in-chief has a lot of autonomy about what her newsroom is going to cover, strategy-wise, in terms of the verticals we’re going to dive into.
I don’t lean in or try to push any particular story. Our CEO, Clayton Collins, also stays out of that as much as possible. A lot of times, it’s really people pitching into our editorial inbox or pitching to a reporter that they’ve developed a relationship with, and then they’re making the call about whether they should cover it or not.
That’s been really good for us—to have separation between business and journalism.
Our editor-in-chief is fully on board with our four user personas and making sure that we’re guiding those personas to make better decisions faster.
She looks at things through that lens when she decides what her newsroom is going to cover.
Lionel Foster: You mentioned you’ve been very clear-eyed about what you focus on and what you don’t, and you said you don’t do much in terms of multifamily. Could you explain a little bit more about why? Are those industries distinct enough that it’s worth making that differentiation?
Diego Sanchez: Yeah, we definitely do differentiate.
Now we have aspirations to eventually push into multifamily because the relationship between rentals and for-sale is so intertwined. We really can’t cover all things housing—which we’d like to do—without thinking about the rental piece. We will push in that direction when it makes sense.
We have been an acquisitive company in the past. We’ve done five acquisitions in the seven-plus years that I’ve been in the business, a couple of those fairly meaningful acquisitions.
We’re not shy about looking for a company that could help us push into multifamily because starting something organically is tough.
But we’re also not averse to launching a multifamily vertical ourselves.
It’s the same with commercial real estate. There’s absolutely some intertwining of commercial and residential in the US, and executives on one side are interested in what’s happening on the other.
That could be another area where an acquisition makes sense or we start something organically.
I think we’re just going to more fully realize our opportunity in single-family residential.
There’s a lot of opportunity in front of us before we would do something organically. Now an acquisition could make a lot of sense, so that could happen sooner.
Lionel Foster: Got it. And so this is something you’re actively thinking about.
What I’m not hearing is that you look at multifamily and think it’s crowded enough that you should just stick to what you’re good at.
Diego Sanchez: Yeah. We’ve really grown HousingWire nicely and in interesting directions over the past seven-plus years, and we think we’ve built a platform that is a multi-revenue stream platform that could make a lot of sense for an acquisition in multifamily or in commercial.
There are other tangential verticals like insurance and banking. We think we do a really good job of being a digital-only, multi-revenue stream publisher and really an information services company with all the data that we’ve got.
I don’t think we’re going to stop at single-family residential, but the opportunity is giant there. We just have to think about when we weigh those M&A decisions—does it make more sense to invest in a company in multifamily, or does it make sense to make HousingWire Intelligence that much more powerful?
Or maybe add one or two user personas and therefore expand coverage in the newsroom and data sets inside HousingWire Intelligence. We just have to weigh those decisions with our board as we think about the future.
Lionel Foster: Now the Trump administration—and to a significant extent President Trump himself—has been creating and talking about housing policy seemingly on the fly and in real time.
It’s fascinating to watch. It’s also a little scary sometimes. You have one of the more interesting vantage points of anyone in the country observing this because of the business you work in. How are you responding to that, thinking about that?
One piece is what good policy would look like, but also how your readers are thinking about it.
Diego Sanchez: Yeah, there’s a lot going on.
There are a lot of ideas, less execution at this point. Sometimes it feels like a lot of spaghetti getting thrown at the wall and seeing what’s going to stick.
As a media company, it’s exciting for us to cover and to help our audience think through the different opportunities.
I think the big problem we have in the US is supply, supply of homes.
A lot of the ideas that have come out are more oriented toward demand, or if they’re oriented toward supply, they don’t actually address a real issue.
I’m thinking about institutional ownership of homes. Even if you look at institutions that own 100 or more doors, it makes up such a small percentage of the overall supply that it probably won’t be that meaningful.
And how do you execute on banning institutional ownership of homes? It’s a tough one to figure out.
To me, it’s all about local regulation—providing incentives for experiments to happen in states and cities.
Experiments like the ADU experiment in California, the abolishment of single-family zoning in Minneapolis and some other cities.
There’s probably some homebuilder incentives that could be put in place for them to build more starter homes.
But if you talk to any homebuilding executive, the big thing in their way is just the mountain of regulation they have to fight through.
It ends up costing $50,000 to $100,000 before you’ve even built the home, just dealing with regulation.
Someone who has been in real estate his entire career, like our president, probably has a decent understanding of local issues and could structure things that would be helpful.
I just haven’t seen that yet.
I think where we would get the most benefit in terms of affordability is to just have a lot more supply of homes across the country.
Lionel Foster: Yeah. I want to circle back to your conversation about some of the various business units and how they do or don’t interact.
HousingWire has, within the industry, a quite popular awards program.
Diego Sanchez: Mm-hmm.
Lionel Foster: And I see competing incentives there.
So on the one hand, I’m just going to describe extremes and not assuming you fall on either of those, but on the one hand there’s one incentive saying, yeah, get as many application fees in as possible.
And if the prospect of coverage on the editorial side would help bring some of those application fees in the door, can we do more of that?
And you could go either way on that.
How do you handle the awards program in such a way that users and readers have confidence that the incentives are properly aligned?
The folks that are being awarded—it’s not just an outcome of aggressively getting as many applications in the door as possible, but there’s some real merit there.
Diego Sanchez: Yeah. I mean, I think what you’re asking is how do we avoid the perception of pay-to-play, which with award programs like this, it’s tough.
When I joined HousingWire, we actually had no submission fee associated with our editorial awards.
And you would think that would mean it’s a more pure program, but the reality is there were so many junk submissions and spam submissions.
It was really an overwhelming process to even wade through the applications on a first pass.
So adding that submission fee—which is, you know, I didn’t talk about our editorial awards when I talked about our revenue and diversification because it’s a very small part of our overall revenue picture, and it’s never going to be meaningful unless we 20x the submission fee—it would just never be meaningful to us.
The way we think about awards is that it’s in our flywheel, our editorial flywheel.
The people who are award winners or who submit for awards are often the people who can be sources for our journalists, they can be speakers on stage at one of our events, and they can also be folks who buy our subscriptions.
We also have award programs that follow the arc of someone’s career.
People can start out as a Rising Star, maybe they’re a Tech Trendsetter at some point, and then they’re a Vanguard, which is our most premier award.
For us, we really think about creating an experience that is editorially led.
Our editor-in-chief is involved with judging every award program, and it has a clear process that we can talk about.
I think it’s impossible to avoid people saying that it’s pay-to-play because you do have to pay to submit.
But what we try to do is create the most editorial process possible and use those submission fees to beef up external reviews.
We bring external reviewers into the process, and that takes a lot of time.
We’ve got an employee at HousingWire who is fully dedicated to managing our editorial award program.
So I think it’s impossible to avoid the pay-to-play accusations, but we just try to build as much editorial as we can into that process.
And also help people understand that it’s not automatic that you’re going to win.
There are far more submissions than there are winners for each program.
That’s how we’ve tried to approach this.
But the reality is it’s just a really small part of our revenue picture.
So we stay in that game because of the flywheel aspects—because those folks are the important people in the industry and we need to get to know them.
Lionel Foster: That makes sense.
So Diego, we’ve covered a heck of a lot, and it went by so quickly. I blinked and nearly missed it.
But before we wrap, is there anything you’d like to share that I didn’t give you a chance to talk about?
Diego Sanchez: No, I actually thought that was a really fun and interesting and wide-ranging conversation.
You’re a great interviewer, asking really insightful questions that made me pause and think at times.
So I really appreciate the work that you’re doing to make this interview great.
We have our big event called The Gathering coming up at the end of April.
It’s April 27th through the 30th, and this is just a really amazing senior executive experience.
Almost 70% of current registrants are in the C-suite, and we pull people from across the entire single-family residential ecosystem.
We’ve got leaders in real estate, leaders in mortgage, leaders in title, appraisal, valuation, and home building all coming together.
And then obviously the tech companies that support them are, in a lot of cases, helping to sponsor the event.
But the way that we do The Gathering is it’s a half day of content and then a half day of activities and networking.
So a lot of business and joint ventures happen at The Gathering every year.
A lot of hiring—people are definitely out there looking for more talent for their C-suite.
So I just want to mention that event. We’re probably going to have a thousand-plus people in Austin for that.
And if you are somebody who is an executive or an aspiring executive in the housing ecosystem, we’d love to see you there.
Lionel Foster: That sounds like a great event.
I’ll also just say for our audience: Diego’s really fun to talk to. You’ve heard it here. He’s super smart, and apparently, like me, if you just reach out to him cold on LinkedIn, he might respond. So be prepared.
Diego Sanchez: I love LinkedIn. I spend quite a bit of time every day on the platform.
I’m still a business development guy at heart. I spent a number of years in business development and sales, and I just love doing outreach on LinkedIn.
It’s such a great platform to make connections like this—meaningful connections.
We set up a podcast on LinkedIn. That’s pretty incredible.
And we just had this great conversation. So yeah, definitely hit me up on LinkedIn. I’m on there pretty frequently.
Lionel Foster: All right. Well, I guess I should thank Reid Hoffman on the way out. And thank you very much, Diego.
Diego Sanchez: Lionel, thanks so much. This was such a pleasure.