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News.com.au
5 days ago
- Business
- News.com.au
‘I turned my real estate side hustle into $3 million fortune'
A US migrant has revealed how she turned her real estate side hustle into a multimillion-dollar fortune. Connie Bai, an immigrant from China, bought her first home in California's San Francisco Bay Area in 2011. Nearly 15 years later, the software program manager's dream of being a homeowner has blossomed into a burgeoning real estate portfolio. Ms Bai now owns three properties, including her primary residence in one of the nation's priciest real estate markets and a rental home, earning her $US2.4 million ($A3.7 million) in equity alone. 'I didn't know the market was low,' Ms Bai told Realtor, looking back on her first foray into real estate. 'I just felt that I wanted to buy a home. I felt the need.' Ms Bai, who briefly worked for Move, Inc., the parent company of Realtor in 2017, said that through her real estate 'side gig,' she has not only cobbled together a small fortune, but also discovered a passion for housing investments. Last year, she obtained her real estate license to become an agent, and she is now preparing to take the broker exam. 'I want to help real estate investors to better invest, invest wisely,' explained Ms Bai. 'I want to help them with my knowledge and experience.' First-time homeowner Ms Bai arrived in the Bay Area from China in 2001 armed with a law degree and a drive to succeed. She pointed out that her mother always taught her to be independent and ambitious — and she took those lessons to heart. 'I want to be successful financially, and I like money,' she readily admitted. 'So I am very highly self-motivated.' In the years that followed, Ms Bai earned a master's degree in computer science from California State University–East Bay, followed by a law degree from the University of California–Berkeley School of Law. By 2009, Ms Bai had been working in tech in Silicon Valley for several years when she decided to launch her own start-up, Yeepet, which she described as a social media network and e-commerce platform for pet lovers. Although her online venture did not survive in the long run, Ms Bai said luck was on her side, because Yeepet generated enough profit to allow her to buy her first home: a four-bedroom, two-bathroom property in San Jose, California, which she snapped up for $US675,000. 'I wanted to own a home and I wanted to have a permanent address,' she said. 'That was the initial motivation.' What Ms Bai did not know at the time was that she was sitting on a gold mine. As Silicon Valley's tech industry exploded, San Jose's housing market has soared. 'I just kept monitoring the market value of the property,' Ms Bai said. 'Every year, it just kept going up.' As of April, San Jose had the highest median list price in the US, at $US1,399,000 ($A2,164,000), up more than 24 per cent from six years ago, according to the latest Monthly Housing Trends Report. That was welcome news for Ms Bai, whose 1964-built home was now worth roughly $US2.2 million ($A3.4 million). Expanding the real estate portfolio But the ambitious tech entrepreneur was not done with her money-making hobby. In December 2019, shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic plunged the world into a state of turmoil, Ms Bai said she observed that the interest rates were low. Although she was not on the market for a second home, she saw an opportunity and again took a swing, closing on a sleek property with a pool in California's Central Valley. Ms Bai said she paid $US567,000, which was more than $US100,000 below the original asking price. Fast-forward to 2025, and that second property, which the homeowner has been using as her vacation retreat, is now valued at around $US800,000 ($A1.2 million). In 2021, at the height of the pandemic, Ms Bai bought a four-bedroom home in the town of Tracy, California, about 20 minutes from the Bay Area, for $US605,000. While the appreciation rate of her third property has been lower than the first two — a estimate shows that the home is currently worth $US649,000 ($A1 million) — Ms Bai said she has been making a handsome profit by renting it out. Ms Bai explained that while buying real estate is never an easy decision, she approaches each closing with confidence informed by her awareness that land in the Bay Area is scarce, which means that its value is bound to go up in the long run. 'So every time I jump into a single-family home, I know I am going to sit on the pile of cash sooner or later,' she added. 'And that's been proven as a fact.' Learning from her mistakes It has not been all smooth sailing for Ms Bai in her real estate journey. Speaking to Realtor, she said that she had made 'a bunch of mistakes' as a novice investor. Her first faux pas was buying a rental home for more than $US500,000 ($A773,000), instead of opting for something cheaper. Ms Bai's second misstep was to splurge on $US50,000 ($A77,000) worth of renovations to the home — even though she knew she was planning to lease it out. 'I tried to treat it as if it was my own home where I would live,' she said, 'but I shouldn't have done it'. Ms Bai's third error was not doing enough homework about the city where she was looking to buy property. She said she learned only after the fact that Tracy, California, does not allow Airbnb-style short-term rentals — something she wished she had known in advance. 'So my advice to those real estate investors like me would be, do your market research, really be aware of yourself,' Ms Bai urged. 'You think you're experienced. Yes, you may be experienced as a homeowner, but you may not be experienced enough as a real estate investor.' Looking ahead, Ms Bai said she plans to continue growing her property holdings, and ultimately transition into real estate full time, but focusing on consulting rather than sales. 'As long as I can provide value, meaning, knowledge, education, guidance, diligence, then money becomes a by-product,' she said.
Associated Press
24-05-2025
- Business
- Associated Press
Innovator of Scalable Real Estate Technology: Srikanth Jonnakuti's Decade of Cloud-First Solutions and Multimillion-Dollar Impact via AI-Driven Automation
From 2018–2025, Srikanth Jonnakuti designed cloud-native, AI-driven platforms at recommendations, serverless AutoML, real-time pricing, zero-trust pipelines, quantum-inspired optimization, and sub-100 ms lead qualification—generating $80 M+ in revenue, saving tens of millions in costs and fines, ensuring 99.9% uptime, and boosting conversions, retention, and customer satisfaction. In today's hyper-competitive property marketplace, agility and intelligence in technology are non-negotiable. Srikanth Jonnakuti, Staff Software Engineer at Move, Inc.—operator of and flagship of News Corp's digital real estate portfolio—has spent the last eight years architecting a suite of cloud-native, AI-powered platforms that have delivered over $80 million in incremental value, shaved millions off operating costs, and redefined how agents and builders connect with buyers. Reimagining Customer Engagement: 2018–2019 From his earliest days, Srikanth tackled the challenge of surfacing the right listings to the right users. In 2018, he spearheaded SimilarSight, deploying GPU-accelerated 'Similar Homes' inference on ECS p3 clusters—boosting ad yield by 0.5 percent ($3 M uplift) and slashing bounce rates across 68 million monthly uniques. That same year, he launched MarketMap and CRMConnect, a serverless forecasting/NLP pipeline and open API framework that together reduced marketing overspend by 20 percent ($4 M saved) and grew CRM partner revenue per lead by 10 percent ($8 M new). His HomeAdvance self-serve storefront drove a 25 percent builder enrollment jump and generated $2 M in new-homes sales, while UUBoost refactored microservices into Fargate—pushing availability to 99.9 percent and sustaining year-over-year unique-user growth. Building on this foundation, Srikanth's 2019 initiatives—including LeadScore Pro, ListFlow, StoreFront, UniqueWave, and FormEnhance—introduced serverless AutoML for lead scoring, optimized React/AppSync flows, and A/B-driven UX enhancements. Conversion lifts ranged from 1 percent (+$6 M) on lead quality to a 16 percentage-point surge in unique submissions (+$4.7 M), while error-rate reductions and standardized GraphQL schemas cut maintenance load by 30 percent. Automation-First Innovation: 2020–2021 In 2020, Srikanth fortified PRO with EdgePulse, AuthNest, ShieldNest, and CSATLift—integrating real-time fault detection at Lambda@Edge, unified Auth0 SSO with PerimeterX protection, and feedback-driven retention loops. These efforts saved $3 M in fraud losses, improved CSAT by 5 points, and drove $3 M in upsell revenue. His 2021 work on TrustBridge, LeadStream, LenderElevate, and CRMScale established zero-trust ingestion pipelines, event-driven email migrations, and federated lead portals. The result: a 25 percent lift in qualified mortgage leads ($4 M), a 30 percent growth in lender adoption, and streamlined notification pipelines saving $3 M annually. API Ecosystem & Compliance at Scale: 2022 As data privacy and quality surged in importance, Srikanth rolled out PriceGuide, PrivacyPulse, DataOpsFlow, and DynamicWave. He built CCPA-compliant purge workflows that averted $5 M in fines, deployed dynamic pricing engines with sub-5-minute updates (yielding an 8 percent fee lift, $5 M), and implemented automated ETL pipelines that cut data incidents by 90 percent ($1 M saved), all while elevating valuation accuracy by 25 percent ($3 M in agent rework avoided). AI-Powered Orchestration & Quantum Innovation: 2023–2025 Most recently, Srikanth has driven a new wave of intelligence across PRO. His AIFoundry, ConvertWave, and AgentEngage platforms leveraged embeddings-based demand generation and multi-agent chat orchestration—generating $7 M in subscription revenue and $10 M in accelerated lead follow-up. StoreOptimize perfected builder storefront UX (+35 percent transactions, $4 M uplift), while QuantumOptimizer and FederAI harnessed quantum-inspired heuristics and federated learning to right-size cloud fleets ($5 M saved) and boost qualified mortgage lead precision by 20 percent ($4 M). In 2025, Srikanth synthesized these learnings into CUBEConnect, LeadLightning, ReferralBoost, and RetainWave—a real-time qualification mesh, sub-100 ms scoring service, GNN-driven referral engine, and federated churn predictor. Collectively, these initiatives have lifted agent conversion by 5 percent ($10 M), recovered $6 M in lost-opportunity revenue, driven a 10 percent referral boost ($4 M), and increased subscription retention by 3 percent (+$3 M ACV). Looking Ahead Srikanth Jonnakuti's portfolio of cloud architectures, streaming pipelines, and AI-first automations has set a new benchmark for digital transformation in real estate. As Move, Inc. and News Corp pursue ever-greater scale, reliability, and intelligence, his ongoing innovations will continue to power seamless experiences for millions of home buyers, sellers, and industry partners worldwide. Media Contact Company Name: CB Herald Contact Person: Ray Email: Send Email Country: United States Website: Press Release Distributed by To view the original version on ABNewswire visit: Innovator of Scalable Real Estate Technology: Srikanth Jonnakuti's Decade of Cloud-First Solutions and Multimillion-Dollar Impact via AI-Driven Automation
Globe and Mail
23-05-2025
- Business
- Globe and Mail
Innovator of Scalable Real Estate Technology: Srikanth Jonnakuti's Decade of Cloud-First Solutions and Multimillion-Dollar Impact via AI-Driven Automation
From 2018–2025, Srikanth Jonnakuti designed cloud-native, AI-driven platforms at recommendations, serverless AutoML, real-time pricing, zero-trust pipelines, quantum-inspired optimization, and sub-100 ms lead qualification—generating $80 M+ in revenue, saving tens of millions in costs and fines, ensuring 99.9% uptime, and boosting conversions, retention, and customer satisfaction. In today's hyper-competitive property marketplace, agility and intelligence in technology are non-negotiable. Srikanth Jonnakuti, Staff Software Engineer at Move, Inc.—operator of and flagship of News Corp's digital real estate portfolio—has spent the last eight years architecting a suite of cloud-native, AI-powered platforms that have delivered over $80 million in incremental value, shaved millions off operating costs, and redefined how agents and builders connect with buyers. Reimagining Customer Engagement: 2018–2019 From his earliest days, Srikanth tackled the challenge of surfacing the right listings to the right users. In 2018, he spearheaded SimilarSight, deploying GPU-accelerated 'Similar Homes' inference on ECS p3 clusters—boosting ad yield by 0.5 percent ($3 M uplift) and slashing bounce rates across 68 million monthly uniques. That same year, he launched MarketMap and CRMConnect, a serverless forecasting/NLP pipeline and open API framework that together reduced marketing overspend by 20 percent ($4 M saved) and grew CRM partner revenue per lead by 10 percent ($8 M new). His HomeAdvance self-serve storefront drove a 25 percent builder enrollment jump and generated $2 M in new-homes sales, while UUBoost refactored microservices into Fargate—pushing availability to 99.9 percent and sustaining year-over-year unique-user growth. Building on this foundation, Srikanth's 2019 initiatives—including LeadScore Pro, ListFlow, StoreFront, UniqueWave, and FormEnhance —introduced serverless AutoML for lead scoring, optimized React/AppSync flows, and A/B-driven UX enhancements. Conversion lifts ranged from 1 percent (+$6 M) on lead quality to a 16 percentage-point surge in unique submissions (+$4.7 M), while error-rate reductions and standardized GraphQL schemas cut maintenance load by 30 percent. Automation-First Innovation: 2020–2021 In 2020, Srikanth fortified PRO with EdgePulse, AuthNest, ShieldNest, and CSATLift —integrating real-time fault detection at Lambda@Edge, unified Auth0 SSO with PerimeterX protection, and feedback-driven retention loops. These efforts saved $3 M in fraud losses, improved CSAT by 5 points, and drove $3 M in upsell revenue. His 2021 work on TrustBridge, LeadStream, LenderElevate, and CRMScale established zero-trust ingestion pipelines, event-driven email migrations, and federated lead portals. The result: a 25 percent lift in qualified mortgage leads ($4 M), a 30 percent growth in lender adoption, and streamlined notification pipelines saving $3 M annually. API Ecosystem & Compliance at Scale: 2022 As data privacy and quality surged in importance, Srikanth rolled out PriceGuide, PrivacyPulse, DataOpsFlow, and DynamicWave. He built CCPA-compliant purge workflows that averted $5 M in fines, deployed dynamic pricing engines with sub-5-minute updates (yielding an 8 percent fee lift, $5 M), and implemented automated ETL pipelines that cut data incidents by 90 percent ($1 M saved), all while elevating valuation accuracy by 25 percent ($3 M in agent rework avoided). AI-Powered Orchestration & Quantum Innovation: 2023–2025 Most recently, Srikanth has driven a new wave of intelligence across PRO. His AIFoundry, ConvertWave, and AgentEngage platforms leveraged embeddings-based demand generation and multi-agent chat orchestration—generating $7 M in subscription revenue and $10 M in accelerated lead follow-up. StoreOptimize perfected builder storefront UX (+35 percent transactions, $4 M uplift), while QuantumOptimizer and FederAI harnessed quantum-inspired heuristics and federated learning to right-size cloud fleets ($5 M saved) and boost qualified mortgage lead precision by 20 percent ($4 M). In 2025, Srikanth synthesized these learnings into CUBEConnect, LeadLightning, ReferralBoost, and RetainWave —a real-time qualification mesh, sub-100 ms scoring service, GNN-driven referral engine, and federated churn predictor. Collectively, these initiatives have lifted agent conversion by 5 percent ($10 M), recovered $6 M in lost-opportunity revenue, driven a 10 percent referral boost ($4 M), and increased subscription retention by 3 percent (+$3 M ACV). Looking Ahead Srikanth Jonnakuti's portfolio of cloud architectures, streaming pipelines, and AI-first automations has set a new benchmark for digital transformation in real estate. As Move, Inc. and News Corp pursue ever-greater scale, reliability, and intelligence, his ongoing innovations will continue to power seamless experiences for millions of home buyers, sellers, and industry partners worldwide.
Reuters
07-04-2025
- Business
- Reuters
CoStar, real estate website competitor end trade-secret lawsuit
April 7 (Reuters) - Real-estate listing website owner Move Inc has agreed to end a lawsuit that accused rival CoStar Group (CSGP.O), opens new tab of poaching one of its former employees to steal its trade secrets, according to a Monday filing in California federal court. The filing said, opens new tab that Move's would dismiss its case with prejudice, which means it cannot be refiled. A spokesperson said in a statement that the company dismissed the lawsuit because it had settled with ex-employee James Kaminsky, who no longer works at CoStar. A spokesperson and attorneys for CoStar did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Kaminsky's attorneys also did not respond to a request for comment and details of the settlement on Monday. said in its lawsuit last year that CoStar misused confidential information from Kaminsky, who ran its "News and Insights" platform, to bolster CoStar's competing real-estate listing website. The lawsuit said that is the second most-visited real-estate listing website in the United States, and that CoStar has been working "aggressively" to grow its rival website alleged that Kaminsky stole documents related to business strategy, industry contacts and "a vast array of other competitively sensitive and valuable information" for CoStar. CoStar responded in a court filing that the claims were "knowingly false" and part of a "flailing effort to stymie the success of which it said had surpassed in the marketplace. Kaminsky also denied the allegations in a separate filing. The case is Move Inc v. CoStar Group Inc, U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, No. 2:24-cv-05607. For Move: Brent Caslin, David Singer, Todd Toral and Carolyn Small of Jenner & Block For CoStar: Nicholas Boyle, Matthew Walch and Joseph Axelrad of Latham & Watkins For Kaminsky: Ethan Brown and Patricia Tenenbaum of Brown Neri Smith & Khan
