After the IPOs of Zillow and Trulia, investors remain bullish on real estate tech companies as funding hits $391M across 71 deals in the last year.
With the economy recovering, investors are increasingly betting on opportunities to use technology to facilitate many aspects of the real estate process. Whether it is platforms for 3D real estate visualizations or real estate agent rankings or online marketplaces for both commercial office space and apartment listings, investors are increasingly interested in finding technology-enabled ways to disrupt this multi-billion dollar industry. Over the last year, $391M has entered the real estate tech market as YoY funding as deal activity jumped more than 86%.
In the past two years, early stage investments at the Seed/Series A rounds brought in almost 58% of deal activity as the IPOs of both Zillow and Trulia have fueled a wave of new investments into the real estate tech industry. The rumored IPO of online real estate brokerage Redfin, backed by Greylock Partners and Madrona Venture Group also highlights another potential real estate tech winner.
Geographically, real estate tech is more diverse than many industries which are California dominated (primarily Silicon Valley). Although Cali saw more than 20% of deals in the last two years, NY is close behind. This is logical given the size of NY’s real estate market (392 million sq ft of office space as per our friends at Cushman & Wakefield). Of course, that could all change very soon as deal growth grew more than 200% in Silicon Valley with recent financings to companies including YC alum 42Floors, which offers a marketplace for commercial space, and Homelight, a Google Ventures-backed real estate agent ranking engine. Despite the presence of both Redfin and Zillow in Seattle, deal activity from the Pac-NW area actually trails that of Texas in the past two years.
Details on the most active investors in the real estate tech industry can be found on the ‘Research’ tab here, after logging in to CB Insights. (Note: The list of most active investors is only available to paid subscribers.)
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