Redfin is launching a new feature today that allows prospective home buyers and sellers to better estimate a home’s value. Anybody who has ever searched for a house or tried to sell one is probably aware of Zillow’s Zestimates – even though they are mostly automated and can’t quite take aspects like locations, view, noise, neighborhood and other details of a house into… → Read More
After launching out of TechStars Boston back in 2011, Cambridge-based real estate marketing platform Placester has raised $2.5 million in seed financing in a round led by new Boston seed fund, Romulus Capital, with participation from other angel investors. Founded in 2009 by a former real estate agent, Matt Barba, the service helps realtors launch their own websites. During TechStars, the… → Read More
The U.S. real estate market is seeing a bit of a rebound right now and, with it, real estate-related online services like Zillow, Redfin and Trulia and newcomers like Houzz are also getting back in the groove of launching regular updates. Trulia today launched its redesigned iPad app, which now features new listing pages with large photos, a new navigation menu and an improved map view. The… → Read More
Last week, a young startup called Realty Mogul took home top honors at “Founder Showcase,” a Silicon Valley pitch competition and networking event hosted by TheFunded.com, in which eight early-stage startups showed off their wares in front of 400 investors and founders. → Read More
Get ready for some more M&A activity in the real estate sector. This morning, the real estate search engine Trulia announced that it is looking to raise up to $100.3 million $150 million in a follow-on offering, with “some or all of such net proceeds to acquire or invest in complementary businesses, products, services, technologies, or other assets.” Trulia went public last year, and… → Read More
Trulia, the popular real estate search engine, just launched the beta of Trulia Suggests, a personalized real estate recommendation engine. The typical search experience on virtually every online real estate site involves telling the service how much you want to pay, how many bedrooms and bathrooms you need and what locations you are interested in. That works, but you often end up looking at many… → Read More
Online real estate broker Redfin just launched a new feature called Offer Insights, which not only tells you what houses are on the market, but also what the actual purchase process was like for homes its agents sold in a given neighborhood.
Because Redfin employs local agents – unlike companies like Zillow, which focus more on lead generation for other brokerages – it has access to a lot more… → Read More
RoomHunt, which is launching today, wants to become the go-to aggregator for rental listings, starting with the competitive San Francisco market. The Web has changed how we search for long-term rentals, and companies like Zillow, Trulia and Zumper all want to become the destination sites for potential renters and landlords in the cities they cover. With the exception of a few services like … → Read More
Houzz is one of those quiet success stories that have the potential to completely change their niches. At its core, the service lets you browse beautiful pictures of home remodeling projects that are organized by metro area and style. If you ever needed some inspiration for your own remodeling project or if you felt like you are due for of a bout of house envy, look no further than the almost 1… → Read More
It’s no secret that real estate site Zillow has been putting quite a bit of emphasis on the rental side of the housing market recently. Today, the company is expanding its portfolio of tools for rental professionals with the launch of its free property management websites for property managers and rental agents. → Read More
Open Home Pro, a startup that began as an iPad application allowing realtors to collect info from potential buyers at open houses, is today launching a new app for iPhone. Unlike its big-brother counterpart, the new iPhone application isn’t meant for open houses, but rather for posting new listings online in a matter of minutes. → Read More
Ask any founders or CEO how they feel about the process of searching for office space for their companies, and the majority of them will shake their heads. Some may even lash out. There is a prevailing sense that searching for office space is, if not horrible, at least somewhat broken. Part of the reason for this is that the industry itself, writ large, remains offline. If you want to find great… → Read More
You’ve heard this story before: Person sets out to find an apartment or buy their first home. Person struggles to navigate the noise of Craigslist, manage applications, impressions, notes, scheduling open house times, and find quality, searchable recommendations on apartments, houses, landlords and real estate agents. Person becomes frustrated and either moves to Canada, blogs about it, or begins… → Read More
How are the recent class of tech IPOs faring? Real estate search engine and Zillow competitor, Trulia went public in September, debuting at $22.10 per share (up 30 percent from its initial pricing) with a valuation around $580 million.
Today, Trulia announced its third quarter earnings — its first report as a public company. While results were mixed overall, the company still managed to give… → Read More
CompStak‘s data is wildly valuable. Without paying a penny, its crowdsourced real estate info platform has compiled the rent, size, and more of 40% of Manhattan commercial leases over the last decade. It’s selling the data to banks and private equity while trading it to real estate agents and landlords for more data. Now CompStak is getting serious, joining 500 Startups who’s led its $565,000… → Read More
Editor’s note: Glenn Kelman, is CEO of Redfin, a technology-powered real estate broker, backed by Greylock Partners and Madrona Venture Group, with more than $7 billion of home sales. He previously co-founded Plumtree Software, which had a 2002 IPO. He writes a quarterly column on Silicon Valley real estate for TechCrunch.
When Michael Arrington calls, you answer. Even if you’re perusing… → Read More
BlockAvenue, which is launching today, has acquired and aggregated about 50 million data points from across the U.S. to assign a letter grade to virtually every neighborhood and city block in the country. According to the company’s founder and CEO Tony Longo, finding the right place to live in a city can be difficult, and in dense urban areas, quality of life is often determined more by which… → Read More
Sawbuck Realty, the makers of that clever mobile app called HomeSnap, which lets users access MLS and public record data just by taking a picture of any U.S. home, has closed on $3.5 million in additional funding, the company announced today. The financing comes from Revolution Ventures and Washington D.C. real estate investor Robert Stewart.
Sawbuck already had $4 million in previous funding… → Read More
3D visualization technology has been around for some time, so Real5D closing a $1.2 million Seria A rund from the U.S. venture fund DoubleRock might look out of place to some. But San Francisco-based startup Real5D has taken 3D visualization to an interesting level of interactivity by applying it to the needs of the commercial real estate industry.
Founded by the Hungarian Balazs Farago… → Read More
When Mark Zuckerberg left Harvard in the summer of 2004, he didn’t move his fledgling company to the mountains, or the Gulf of Mexico, or San Francisco, he moved to Silicon Valley. Well, Palo Alto to be precise. In an interview with Y Combinator partner Jessica Livingston last year, he said of his impression of Silicon Valley, “You get this feeling that you need to be out here.” Many founders are… → Read More
Hot on the heels of completing its acquisition of Findaproperty last week, Zoopla is increasing its online real estate inventory once again: it will operate the property portals for the UK daily newspapers the Independent, the Evening Standard, and the Evening Standard’s popular standalone property site (itself an offshoot of a printed supplement) Homes And Property, on an exclusive basis. All… → Read More
Zillow, the popular online real estate search engine, just announced that it has closed its previously announced $40 million acquisition of RentJuice. With RentJuice, Zillow now owns a rental relationship management service for landlords, property managers and rental brokers that helps them market their inventory and client relationships. RentJuice is currently being used to manage one million… → Read More
Real estate search company Trulia is adding to its mobile lineup today with the launch of Trulia Rentals for iPhone. The app joins its Android rentals-only counterpart, which launched back in September. Like the former, the new iPhone app will also offer a dedicated view of nearby rentals, including property details, photos, as well as other neighborhood rental info, including where restaurants… → Read More
Jason Freedman, co-founder of the new YC-backed startup 42Floors launching today, says he got the idea for the startup because “searching for office space just really, really sucked.” The reason the process was so miserable, he says, is because he was powerless. To find commercial real estate, he had to go through brokers who all insisted they had access to proprietary data. But when each broker… → Read More
Sawbuck Realty, an online real estate broker, has just launched a new app called HomeSnap which lets you discover information about any home nationwide just by taking a photo of it. Using a combination of mobile phone sensors to determine location and orientation as well as MLS and public records data, HomeSnap can tell you everything about a home, including how many square feet it has, number of… → Read More
In December, Eric covered Open Home Pro, a startup that lets realtors sell homes via their iPads. Today, there comes a similar effort from Pixloo, except this service is designed for use by anyone – realtors and homeowners alike. With Pixloo, you can upload information about your home, including text, photos and even videos and then immediately export that data to major real estate sites… → Read More
Vacation homes sit empty most of the year, representing a huge amount of untapped inventory waiting to be discovered online. Large services such as HomeAway, VRBO, and TripAdvisor’s FlipKey are taking advantage of this market opportunity, but for many vacation homeowners managing their listings online is still too much of a hassle. They end up handing over the keys to local rental property… → Read More
Brokers are not all the same. Some can pull a little extra cash out of a house and some are good at the fast sell. Some will try to force you to rent a room in a basement with barely enough room to stand up. That’s why StreetEasy, a real estate site popular with the New York apartmentatti, has added broker ratings to their paid property search platform.
This service allows you to see who is… → Read More
Nuroa, a real estate vertical search engine launched in Spain in 2007, has secured an additional €1 million from Highgrowth Ventures, their investor from a previous round in 2007. The new round comes during a difficult time in Spain and particularly in real estate, but Nuroa appears to have grown well during the last year. Traffic growth has been 200% up just during the first quarter of 2010. In… → Read More
A man in Italy bought the small Texas town of Albert on eBay for $3.8 million on Friday. That’s awesome. I wish I had my own town. Lucky jerk. Good for him, though. Nobody currently lives in the town, but there’s a bar that’s open on the weekends. Go figure. The town is about 13 acres large and includes "a pavilion, an 85-year-old dance hall, a tractor shed, a three-bedroom… → Read More
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