January 15, 2009 -- (Crain’s) — Alex Zoghlin, the former chief technology officer of Orbitz Inc., has booked a trip to residential real estate.

Mr. Zoghlin, 38, who created the travel Web site’s search engine, started this week as CEO of VHT Inc., a real estate marketing firm backed by Chicago-based Hopewell Ventures, the venture capital firm founded by former Democratic National Committee Chairman David Wilhelm.

Mr. Zoghlin’s task will be to build an audience for VHT’s RealEstateMediaMarketplace.com, where residential brokers can go to buy ads in other media. Inert residential sales and the difficulty raising investment capital would seemingly make this a tough time to launch such a venture, but Mr. Zoghlin says the slow housing market increases the importance of marketing, which should benefit the site.

"I certainly wouldn't bet against Alex on this," says Jeff Clarke, president and CEO of New Jersey-based Travelport Inc., which last year bought G2 SwitchWorks Corp., a travel technology firm Mr. Zoghlin started after leaving Orbitz in 2004.

RealEstateMediaMarketplace.com is intended to make it easier for brokers to place and manage ads in numerous online outlets and print publications at the same time. Started in August, it has just 3,000 registered users and will be relaunched this spring. VHT doesn’t charge users a fee, instead collecting commissions from the companies where the ads are placed.

"I see so much potential here," Mr. Zoghlin says. "No one else is going after real estate agents to help them take advantage of new technology."

Even for the high-tech industry, Mr. Zoghlin is a colorful character. He’s known for his ponytail, which he cut off about 18 months ago after some boys teased his then-5-year-old daughter for having hair shorter than her dad’s.

Without the long hair, Mr. Zoghlin jokes that he’s lost his “tech cred.” But even a shorter-haired Mr. Zoghlin has given a boost to VHT, says Brian Balduf, VHT’s co-founder and chairman.

"This sends the message that we're serious," he says.

Des Plaines-based VHT, founded in 1999, already provides high-definition photography, video property tours and other visual marketing services to a customer base of about 75,000 real estate brokers. Now, the 50-employee company’s ambitious plan is to persuade about half of the nation’s 1 million residential brokers to regularly use the new site.

Many larger residential real estate firms already have marketing staff that handles ad placement for their brokers, limiting VHT’s potential audience, says James Kinney, president of Chicago-based Rubloff Residential Properties.

"But if there's a cheaper, better or more efficient way, we'd look at it," he says.

VHT has already raised roughly $7 million since 2007, including about $5 million from Hopewell, Mr. Balduf says.

Mr. Zoghlin, a Wilmette native, dropped out of New Trier Township High School to join the U.S. Navy. He enrolled in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 1992, where he was part of the team that invented an early Web browser called Mosaic, but never graduated.

Six years later he sold his first company, a Web site developer, for $65 million, according to published reports. In 2000, he was the first person hired by Orbitz, where he created the online travel agency's search engine before leaving four years ago.