Managed Hosting Supports Growth

In Layered Tech, HomeTelos found a flexible, customer-focused hosting provider geared to providing on-demand support and experienced in addressing the needs of high growth enterprises.

“With Layered Tech as our infrastructure partner, we receive superior service and unfailing technical support. Layered Tech allows HomeTelos to completely focus on our customers and our growth rather than our infrastructure.”
-Lydia Chase, HomeTelos co-owner

HomeTelos®, LP, is a real estate services and technology company with a single focus — helping clients exceed their goals. With its leading-edge workflow and offer management technology, robust online marketplace, and innovative outsourcing solutions, HomeTelos helps clients maximize the sale of real estate assets, improve operating efficiency and increase customer satisfaction.

The Greek word, “Telos,” is defined as the “end of a goal-oriented process,” and it speaks to the overall vision of the products and services of HomeTelos. Founded in 2001 by real estate professionals who needed workflow applications that did not exist, HomeTelos’ Web-based solutions are designed from a business perspective so that property management and disposition services are more orchestrated and efficient and enable clients to achieve “Telos.”

HomeTelos quickly grew after developing and launching HomeTracker®, which combines workflow automation, document management and real-time communication to manage all components of a client’s property lifecycle. HomeTracker fulfills a service that was desperately needed by large asset managers, including government and financial institutions. Since its launch, HomeTracker has helped clients effectively manage and sell more than 250,000 assets.

Success and growth continued when HomeTelos expanded its offerings by creating BidSelect®, an online marketplace to maximize sales and efficiency. BidSelect quickly became a valued resource for buyers, brokers and asset managers because of its easy to use and complete management capabilities. BidSelect is so popular that it receives more than 12 million monthly page views, has more than 300,000 registered users, and on average, facilitates the sale of properties within 37 days for 96 percent of the listing price.

Growth Begets Growth

HomeTelos’ success and sophisticated client base brought about additional infrastructure needs, so in early 2009, HomeTelos re-evaluated its Web hosting setup to ensure that clients received the most robust foundation with guaranteed business continuity. The company’s customer-focused operations and ongoing growth made it essential to have a more customer-focused hosting provider that was not only flexible and able to manage a complex architecture, but most important, geared toward providing on-demand support.

After researching Web hosting companies, HomeTelos chose Layered Technologies because of its flexibility, customized solutions, personal customer service, and experience supporting the needs of high growth and enterprise customers.

“Our approach to business is very customer-service focused, and we want to offer solutions that work for our clients,” said Lydia Chase, co-owner of HomeTelos. “We saw that same approach in Layered Tech and knew that by obtaining their managed hosting solutions, we could continue to grow and meet our clients’ evolving asset management needs.”

Partnership Creates a Win-Win

HomeTelos desired top-tier hardware configured to scale and accommodate future growth, designed so that additional components could easily be added. Doug Bland, HomeTelos’ director of IT, received direct support and counsel from the Layered Tech team to develop a customized, secure and high-availability solution. 

“During our regular conversations with Layered Tech, we explained our environment and infrastructure needs. The Layered Tech team exceeded our expectations,” said Bland. “Usually you get a percentage of what you buy from an infrastructure provider, but we received 110 to 120 percent of what we expected, and it has positively impacted how we support our clients.”

Layered Tech completed a complex implementation that involved transferring terabytes of data with no downtime. Since the transition, HomeTelos has experienced faster Web site performance due to the more advanced infrastructure, and the company has more bandwidth for its growing needs. Layered Tech’s managed dedicated servers offer high availability to ensure that HomeTelos clients always have access to the tools and data they need to do business.

“Layered Tech has delivered a consistent, high level of service, and their recommendations and support have been invaluable,” said Bland. “We worked with Layered Tech to achieve the highest levels of security and redundancy, which are required by our large government and financial institution clients. Layered Tech had the ability, experience and SAS 70 certification to make that happen.”

Layered Tech supported HomeTelos’ geographical redundancy needs by automatically transferring data from the Dallas data center to a “warm site” in the Chicago data center, which ensured data is safe and always available. For an added level of business continuity, Layered Tech also integrated R1Soft’s disaster recovery solution into the infrastructure for continuous data backup. All of these measures have enabled HomeTelos to meet the most demanding of contractual requirements and continue to expand its client base.