Tom Rees’s Journey From High Living to Living High, Takes Him Into Business World of Sober Living

Published January 17, 2011

Tom Rees’s Journey from High Living to Living High, Takes Him into Business World of Sober Living

The treatment center’s list was not helpful guiding me towards a sober living, either.

Los Angeles, CA (PRWEB) January 13, 2011

Tom Rees believes strongly that the sober living experience plays a much more critical role in the treatment process of drugs and alcohol than most people think. In fact it is likely the missing link that most alcoholics or addicts need who want to turn the corner for the last time on drinking and/or drug addiction. Tom Rees, at least, believes this to the degree he has been putting his money where his mouth is. For 18 months he has been developing the mother of all sober living search sites with Sober Living Halfway House Search, launched in October of 2010. It is a site that centers around a geography-based search engine’s ability to cull through a database of up to 6000 houses – 10 times the number of any other such site — to find the home that is exactly right for the person doing the searching.

He calls attention to the large numbers of people in treatment who turn their backs on sober living, the most notable reason for which he believes is a fear of the unknown when it comes time for patients to leave the relative safety of the treatment centers. He acknowledges he had the same fear which almost kept him from going to sober living. It was this notion that prompted him to focus on the “one- page- shows-all-results” approach Sober Living Halfway House Search utilizes that includes a lot of pictures to help nervous searchers overcome their fears about that next step. “If we can get a person comfortable and maybe even a little psyched-up for sober living then I’m betting that more people will take advantage of it. He does acknowledge however, that a few more hurdles have to be crossed.

“First of all, sober living should be a required step in the formal treatment curriculum and it’s not” says Rees. “It’s presented as this kind of add-on thing you can do, while in fact I believe in reality it comprises as much of 50% of one’s overall “treatment” — at least it did for me. But people should be able to go to a site, type in a location, price and a few other parameters and be presented with a full selection of houses to choose from. Then you wouldn’t have so many people backing out at the last second, like I almost did” he says.

Rees believes that the lists of house managers to call that treatment centers circulate and the need to set up house appointments from those lists is just too tall of an order for the average person already nervous about leaving treatment. That person may not even have transportation for all anybody knows either.

Rees has been developing Sober Living Halfway House Search and building a database for the past 18 months. He launched the site in October 2010 with 4000 sober living and halfway homes. Sober Living Halfway House Search reaches into all states nationwide, but is currently focusing on California to jump-start the business and invite new houses to join the site. Sober Living Halfway House Search is at the URL soberlivingsearch.com

Rees envisioned a site that operated using a geography-based search engine that could showcase the best features of a house in a given area using pictures and a statement from the house manager. He’d have a list of amenities along with a few other features. A street level Google map and a listing of house licenses and associations, all put together on an elegant page that could be compared to similarly laid out pages –would make selecting a house so much easier. He wanted to make it so easy and comfortable that it might even result in more people opting into sober living.

“Good pictures are key” says Rees. “Not to sound trite, but pictures are worth more than a thousand words to a potential sober living guest “. He acknowledges some sites have plenty of them, but they are a bunch of random pages of information presented “willy-nilly” and in different formats. Nonetheless, “We include a big blue hyperlink on our House Details page so if a guest likes a house, he or she can click a link and be on that house’s personal site.”This way no house loses its identity through Sober Living Halfway House Search — they just get a pick-up in traffic. We are just making everything a little more standardized and easy to find”.

Sober Living Halfway House Search has an undisclosed additional number of homes that could bring the total database of houses up to between 6000 and 8000 in 2011. The Company wants to cover 75% or more of the recovery housing market, so that people can be guaranteed to find a house through this site.

Rees’s site is offering a 50% discount for houses to join in the first few months of 2011. He is optimizing Sober Living Search to come up first for all the keyword phrases that are used on Google for sober living and halfway house searches. “We already come up first or first page for about 15 searches”, he says. “And at a cost of just $ 189, 1 referral alone from the site puts you in the black.”

An additional bonus involves how those “one-page-shows-all” pages are handled by Google. The company has coded the meta tags on each house page to enable the pages to be indexed separately so that they stand on their own. So if you have a house in Albany, New York, and somebody does a search using the words “sober living, Albany”, your page is going to show up in the local results, hopefully at or near the top of that page. This way, you have a second method of attracting that searcher’s eyeballs.

Sober Living Halfway House Search is located in Westwood, California, and is inviting houses from California and all other states to check out their revolutionary new site at the URL soberlivingsearch.com. Rees’s vision for this stage is for potential guests to be able to come to one central site, know they are going to get a full selection of houses to review, and compare several different houses without the pressure of having to visit a houses all over the place. This way, they can make an informed and comfortable decision about the house they are going to join from the comfort of their rooms at their treatment centers.”

About Sober Living Halfway House Search: The Company’s parent Rees Networks LLC was founded in 2009 after Tom Rees, CEO, came through rehab and attended a sober living after inpatient treatment. He overcame a dual diagnosis of Bipolar 2 Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), ADHD, and Chemical Dependence, and then decided to own and operate two sober living homes. In so doing, he recognized a great need for a comprehensive recovery housing site. Rees’s long term vision includes building a full service resource site that would act like a “mini- Google” for the recovery industry to be used by both laymen and professionals.

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