TripleMint, a New York City startup aiming to take the pain out of buying, selling and renting an apartment, has raised $1.65 million in seed funding.
Investors include Dominion Capital, Winklevoss Capital (yes, those Winklevoss twins), Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, Kima Ventures, Archangel Ventures, Fabrice Grinda, Tom Falus (former president of Cushman & Wakefield) and Mike Albanese (publisher of the New York Observer).
We’ve actually written about TripleMint before, under its old name Suitey. The company just took on the new name; co-founder David Walker said it’s meant to convey both the quality of the apartments people will find on the site, as well as the quality of the service.
“The process of buying, selling and renting an apartment, it should be amazing,” Walker said. “Selling an apartment should be the most exciting thing you do.”
The name change also signifies TripleMint’s expanded services. The core is still the same — it allows prospective buyers and renters to search their local broker database directly. Then, once you’ve found the apartments that you want to check out, you don’t have to contact a long list of different brokers. Instead, a single TripleMint broker can help you tour all of them.
Those brokers, by the way, are actually full-time employees with benefits and equity in TripleMint. And perhaps most importantly for customers, they’re not just paid on a straight commission basis. They also receive a bonus based on customer satisfaction, so there’s less incentive to pressure you to just make the deal.
“When you look at real estate from the pure technology lens, there’s a ton of focus and a lot of companies that are media companies centered around selling ads on listing search pages,” Walker added. “And very few have really focused on the actual consumer experience.”
As for features beyond the real estate brokerage, TripleMint also offers a concierge moving service, with discounts for local service providers. And it’s announcing that it will donate a portion of the revenue from each transaction to Rebuilding Together NYC, a nonprofit that helps low-income families stay in their homes.
TripleMint is currently available in the NYC boroughs of Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn, with a particular focus on Manhattan, Walker said. and yes, there are plans to expand, although he didn’t offer any details about the timing.