See what's coming next

Mark Dickson's business is predictive analytics, but even he would have had a hard time forecasting how fast his startup would grow.

He launched the company, Sarasota-based offrs.com, from the garage in his east Manatee County home in January 2015. Its core product: an information-is-king kind of
software that real estate brokers use to pinpoint which homes in a specific territory will be listed for sale — before they hit the market. The offrs.com algorithm looks at
dozens of variables that can impact home listings, from loan-to-value ratios to a pending divorce to the age of the youngest child in the home. The company charges a
monthly fee for the software.

Not yet two years later, offrs.com

has sales in 44 states and 4,000 clients, including agents with Coldwell Banker, Keller Williams and Berkshire-Hathaway. It also has 75 employees, including 40 in Sarasota, with plans to hire up to 15 more people in 2017. The company plans to move from a 3,500-square-foot office in the HuB building in downtown Sarasota to a 6,500-square-foot office a few blocks away, in the former Golden Apple Dinner Theater building.

“It's been phenomenal,” Dickson tells Coffee Talk. “I think we have a product that's really fit a need, and it's at an inexpensive pinpoint.”

The new employees, says Dickson, are for a combination of tasks, from sales and marketing to software development. A recent hire is Frank Chimento, a former regional director in the Tampa-St. Petersburg area for Realtor.com named vice president of national business development in August. Chimento, in a statement, says offrs.com's business model is like “hiring a full-time team of marketing experts that do all the legwork 24/7 for a cost that's less than one employee.”

One challenge that hangs over the company, Dickson says, is customer education on what predictive analytics can do for sales. But he expects 2017 to be something of a coming out party for the technology. “I'm really excited about where we are positioned in the marketplace,” Dickson says.