Mobile home shopping app Homesnap, the public face of the real estate industry’s Broker Public Portal national MLS website, has raised $14 million in Series B funding led by Updata Partners with participation from Moderne Ventures (which inducted Homesnap into its 2018 Passport Class) among other individual investors. This brings the company’s total capital raised to $32.8 million.
“Homesnap delivers what consumers and agents want, and what the real estate industry needs. Now investors are saying we want to be part of that success too,” said Homesnap CEO John Mazur in a press release.
The funding will, no doubt, also bolster the Broker Public Portal (BPP), the broker/multiple listing service-led venture that Homesnap partially owns and serves as the face of.
BPP recently announced 150 percent year-over-year growth, which represents a jump from a user base of 45 MLSs to more than 120 MLSs comprising 800,000 agents and brokers, since joining forces with Homesnap in 2016. At the time of the growth announcement, Homesnap co-founder Steve Barnes revealed grand plans for the joint venture, saying they’d focus on doubling Homesnap’s 45-person staff, with the majority of hires concentrated in technology development, a key part of improving the Homesnap desktop and mobile apps.
“We must be doing something right when many of the smartest people in real estate, and some of the brightest people in technology, invest in your company,” said Barnes in January. “As we continue to scale even larger, our ability to provide more collaborative features for agents and consumers will increase as we make significant investments in the Broker Public Portal and Homesnap.”
Barnes elaborated on his plans to improve Homesnap’s desktop and mobile apps, saying the $14 million will be used to develop new, premium productivity tools for agents and expand the company’s automated digital marketing services for agents and brokers that currently include personalized Facebook, Instagram and Waze Local ads.
BPP vice chairman John Mosey said the investments from Updata Partners and Moderne Ventures further validate the portal’s existence and effectiveness, which has drawn its fair share of skepticism and criticism since it launched in 2015.
“This is strong investor affirmation of what we have been saying — that Broker Public Portal has something companies selling ads do not: MLS- and especially broker-ownership that always puts industry stakeholders’ interests first,” said Mosey.
“This huge boost in funding is going to help accelerate the growth of BPP with Homesnap,” he added. “And as BPP has promised, Homesnap is fantastic technology that will keep on getting better and better.”
Moderne Ventures founder and managing partner Constance Freedman echoed Mosey’s sentiments, saying that Homesnap offers a “value proposition” that is hard to beat.
“We look at over 4,500 real estate related technology companies every year, and Homesnap has created a value proposition for the industry that outshines almost everything else we’ve seen,” said Freedman in a press statement. “One of the many attractive things about Homesnap is that it was built with the best interests of agents, brokers and our industry in mind. This has made all the difference in driving adoption of Homesnap across the country.”
