PHOTO: LookSmart co-founder Evan Thornley’s next business is a real estate agency. YouTube
Property is a long way from entrepreneur and investor Evan Thornley’s first successful business venture, a dotcom-era internet search and listings darling called LookSmart.
Back in 1999, Mr Thornley and co-founder Tracy Ellery took the dual Nasdaq and ASX listed LookSmart to a market capitalisation of $14.2 billion before the dotcom crash.
Now Mr Thornley has turned his business skills to real estate.
“I’m an accidental real estate agent,” he says.
A conversation with business partner Antony Cohen four years ago, about the poor service property investors encounter in the real estate industry, led them to launch an investor-focused estate agency called LongView.
“It’s not intuitive to me as a business person that an industry would be so neglectful of what potentially are its most valuable clientele,” he said.
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