TechCrunch
When consumers are home shopping these days, they tend to be drawn to consumer-friendly portals like Zillow, Trulia, Redfin and others, which offer simple, user-friendly tools to take on what’s otherwise a complex and confusing process. But these services can also sideline real estate agents, who are often still stuck using dated technology while their customers are being lured away by other agents on these popular sites. A company called RealScout has been addressing that problem, by giving agents powerful tools of their own, and now has closed on $6 million in Series A funding to continue to grow its business.
The round was led by DCM with participation from Formation 8. Additional investors included Ken DeLeon, the top realtor in the U.S. in 2012 according to The Wall Street Journal and REAL Trends; and Matthew Moore, formerly VP of sales and marketing at Realtor.com and an investor in Retsly, which sold to Zillow.
With RealScout, the idea is about providing a consumer-friendly service which real estate agents themselves can offer their clients through an agent-branded mobile app for iOS and the web. Using the service, potential home buyers can perform narrow, personalized searches on RealScout, allowing them to look for things like homes with “big back yards,” or “gourmet kitchens,” for example. Those natural-language queries can then be responded to via automated email alerts that help customers find home that match their niche criteria, and can help agents better retain, and ultimately convert, their high-value customers.Read More