Real estate marketing is no walk in the park. Not only do realtors have to weather market volatility, but they need to meet buyers where they shop — creating compelling marketing experiences while keeping costs under control.
Malte Kramer experienced the roadblocks firsthand while working as a marketing consultant for real estate company Jade Mills. To address them, he founded Luxury Presence, a startup that provides marketing solutions to real estate agents, teams and brokerages.
“We offer products and services that help real estate agents, teams and brokerages succeed in all economic environments and housing markets,” Kramer told TechCrunch in an email interview. “This has allowed us to continue to grow throughout the pandemic, the slowdown in tech and the slowdown in real estate.”
Luxury Presence, which today announced that it raised $19.2 million in a Series B1 round led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Switch Ventures and other existing investors, offers a range of tools and services designed to help realtors market their properties to home buyers.
Luxury Presence assists with creating real estate websites, ads, content marketing strategies, social media engagement and more. Using its platform and content management system, customers can build their own webpages and presentations for properties, or list their properties on Luxury Presence’s growing home search database.
Recently, Luxury Presence launched Presence Copilot, an AI-powered mobile app for realtors with client collaboration features, in private beta.
“Luxury Presence is focused on serving high-performing real estate professionals with modern, best-in-class technology,” Kramer said. “Our platform provides a comprehensive, one-stop solution for real estate marketing, branding and client communication, ensuring that agents, teams and brokerages have all the tools they need to elevate their brands and grow their businesses.”
Marketing bluster aside, Luxury Presence is, indeed, growing, with a customer base that now numbers just over 10,000 real estate agents. With a team of around 600 employees, including 300 full-time workers based in the U.S., Luxury Presence intends to use the new tranche — which brings its total raised to $52.5 million — to support its product development.
“Like most companies, Luxury Presence has been closely managing expenses and burn rate over the past year to avoid needing additional capital,” Kramer said.
It’ll have to continue managing expenses wisely. While proptech companies haven’t historically had much trouble securing capital, last year saw the sector suffer from a steep decline. VC-backed proptech companies raised $19.8 billion in 2022, down 38% from 2021. The Center for Real Estate Technology & Innovation reports that the drop-off in funding is the second-lowest investment year for proptech since 2018.
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