The US’ housing market appears to be in a very juxtaposing position. On one hand, a larger number of cities are slowly making their way onto the millionaire’s club, with Zillow recently reporting that the average home costs around $1 million in 197 different U.S. cities. However, this is during a time of when the market is also slowing down and could be heading for a serious slump.
Regardless of this paradoxical activity, one startup has seized a golden opportunity within today’s market and shows great promise for the future. Landis, a platform using data science to help institutional real estate investors buy and sell residential real estate, announced its acquisition of GoldenKey, a well-funded startup that set out to disrupt real estate agents and unbundle the real estate industry.
This acquisition follows previous successes covered here on The Sociable and across other publications, which indicates that this innovative startup is heading in the right direction to shake up this promising market.
Co-founded by Cyril Berdugo and Tom Petit, Landis helps large-scale investors buy and sell properties. These investors, who rent out those homes, can use Landis’ platform to perform all necessary steps for completing a transaction. The private platform creates a streamlined process by eliminating the hassle of dealing with the multiple listing services which have regional monopolies over real estate listing data.
“The single family rental space is incredibly exciting at the moment,” said Cyril Berdugo, cofounder at Landis. “We’re thrilled to leverage GoldenKey’s expertise to provide better service to sellers and bring more targeted deal flow to the large institutional investors that we’re proud to serve.”
Landis now works with 11 of the top 15 single family home buyers in the US, giving them a significant pool of real estate data to work with. This acquisition of GoldenKey gives Landis access to even more data and all of its IP to work with. Since launching in 2015, GoldenKey has raised $3.4 million from investors including Lowe’s Ventures and NFX Guild. The startup’s model offers home sellers either a set of unbundled services (listing, home showing, transaction coordination, etc.) or a flat rate bundle for selling their homes.
Disclosure: This article includes a client of an Espacio portfolio company
