Dive Brief:
- Real estate tech startup Compass announced a $75 million investment round, led by Wellington Management Capital, bringing its total funding to $210 million. The company is valued at more than $1 billion, according to TechCrunch.
- Compass is an ad-free real estate listing site that centers around broker listings for rentals and home sales. The company charges a transaction fee and said it processes $7 billion each year.
- Compass officials said they will use the cash to grow the company into other markets, as it now handles only a few prime ones like Miami and the Hamptons.
Dive Insight:
The company said it will use its "transformative" technology to influence the "antiquated real estate industry," but it has its work cut out for it. The real estate listing market is dominated by popular sites like Zillow, Trulia and Realtor.com, but Compass is counting on its advanced metric-based searches and quarterly market reports to lure homebuyers away.
In another segment of real estate tech, commercial real estate management platform provider VTS announced in May that it had raised $55 million in an investment round led by Insight Venture Partners, bringing its total investment to $84 million. VTS said its customers are able to keep up with and manage leasing patterns, performance and operations using its system. VTS' customers are primarily landlords and brokers, and, at the time of the investment, the company said it planned to improve its existing products and expand into other countries.
Even New York real estate titan Daniel Tishman entered the real tech industry last year with California-based Ecorithm, a software company that aims to increase building energy efficiency for property owners. The company said the system is based on jet engine technology and can reduce costs and improve the quality of tenant and retail customer surroundings.
