Remodelers nationwide can expect to get a stepped-up campaign to sign up as a service provider for HomeAdvisor now that the service has taken over Angie's List, the combined companies' CEO says.
"We’ve added around 225 salespeople year-to-date (up 23% since the beginning of the year), most of them in Q3," IAC's chief executive officer, Joey Levin, wrote in a letter to shareholders sent Nov. 8. "We weren’t adding salespeople fast enough in the first half of the year--we literally ran out of physical real estate to house them--and now need to catch up. ... We’re also moving an additional 250 former Angie’s List salespeople into the HomeAdvisor salesforce, well ahead of our initial expectations."
Levin's letter accompanied IAC's release of earnings for the July-to-September quarter. HomeAdvisor absorbed Angie's List on Sept. 29, so the results contained a full quarter's worth of results for HomeAdvisor and just one day's numbers for Angie's list.
Solicitations to join HomeAdvisor will be coming because its coterie of remodelers and other service providers rose 25% in the third quarter to 172,000 while requests from homeowners for services grew 36% to total 5 million. "And we haven’t yet widely released the HomeAdvisor customer experience on Angie’s List, which will drive even more demand," Levin wrote. Because the increased demand means more potential work, revenue per service professional has risen about 6% year-over-year, he said.
IAC touts its merger as a marriage of HomeAdvisor's network of service pros with the consumers who joined Angie's List over the years. IAC officials say the services provided by pros in its network tend more toward handyman work and simple, lower-cost services, but over time they expect consumers to increasingly go online to find higher-priced remodeling services.
The earnings announcement reported that revenue across all of HomeAdvisor grew 36% to $181.7 million; the U.S. part of the business increased 34%. Further down the earnings report, HomeAdvisor reported it swung to an operating loss of $112.5 million from a $10.1 million profit a year before. It blamed that mainly on $101.6 million in stock-based compensation expenses, most of it related to the Angie's List deal.
