Real estate tech startups are raising money and seeing deals at record levels, with a new high of over 190 deals in 2015. Over the last few years investors have been placing bets on an expanding set of real estate tech categories, including property and lease management platforms, virtual viewing tech, real estate analytics, and more.
We used CB Insights’ Business Social Graph, which shows how top investors, acquirers, and target companies are related, in order to analyze where some of the top real estate corporations and investors are striking deals.
Specifically, we analyzed the investment activity of the following 13 most active corporations, corporate venture arms, and venture capital firms:
- Zillow
- CoStar Group
- Renren Lianhe Holdings
- Camber Creek
- 500 Startups
- Thrive Capital
- Frontier Digital Ventures
- SV Angel
- BoxGroup
- DCM Ventures
- Felicis Ventures
- RRE Ventures
- MetaProp VC
In the graph below, investments are represented by green lines, acquisitions by orange lines.
Click on the graph to enlarge.
Some interesting takeaways from analyzing the graph above:
- Zillow is by far the most active acquirer among our most active investors since 2011. Zillow‘s deals range from large acquisitions like Trulia (bought for $3.5B in July 2014) to smaller acquisitions like StreetEasy (bought for $50M in August 2013). Zillow has completed 11 acquisitions since 2011. Categories they have been active in include mortgage tech (they acquired Mortech) to listing and search services (they acquired StreetEasy).
- 500 Startups is the most active VC in real estate tech since 2011. The firm made one investment so far in 2016 in BetterView, but made several early-stage investments in 2015. Some of their 2015 bets include mortgage platform Lenda and real estate agent-matching service HomeLight. 500 Startups investments’ span startups from analytics companies like Compstak to listing services like 42Floors (where Thrive is also invested), among many others.
- Camber Creek, the venture capital arm of real estate developer Berman Enterprises, is the most active CVC investor in real estate tech startups since 2011. Their investments include leasing-management software VTS and commercial real estate analytics company CompStak, to name a few.
Overlapping investments:
- Commercial real estate search company 42Floors has overlapping investments from four separate investors on our list: 500 Startups, BoxGroup, SV Angel, and Thrive Capital. 42Floors hasn’t raised funding in more than 3 years, but counts an impressive list of investors as backers to date.
- Leasing-management software startup Hightower counts three VC firms from our list as backers: RRE Ventures, Thrive Capital, and BoxGroup.
- Matterport, the California-based virtual-viewing startup, is also backed by three investors from among our list of most active real estate tech investors — Felicis Ventures, DCM Ventures, and BoxGroup.
- Malaysia-based VC Frontier Digital Ventures and 500 Startups are both invested in Latin America-focused listing service VivaReal. VivaReal has raised $61.7M to date.
- Renren Lianhe Holdings, the venture arm of Chinese social network Renren, and the previously-mentioned Camber Creek have been active investors as well. They are both investors in the investment platform Fundrise, having both participated in the Series A in May 2014.
There are a number of over overlapping takeaways. Take a look at the graphic to see where investors and corporation are placing bets.
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