Offerpad has expanded its reach further into the heart of South Carolina, now conducting direct cash purchases and sales in the state’s capital city.
The real estate tech company on Tuesday announced its iBuyer service had gone live in 59 cities and towns in the Columbia area. The company was already active in a number of the Palmetto State’s northwestern cities, as well as the North Carolina metro areas of Charlotte and Raleigh.
“Columbia is a great real estate market, especially now,” Carolinas General Manager Kyle Rush said in a news release. “The market has been top of mind for some time and we’re happy to now provide a huge population of South Carolinians Offerpad’s digitally enhanced real estate solutions and services.”
With the Columbia area under its belt, the company will soon turn to other planned expansions in Kansas City, St. Louis and Columbus, Ohio, according to a company spokesperson.
These efforts are part of Offerpad’s broader growth efforts as the company prepares to go public. Earlier this year, the company announced expansions into Denver, Nashville and Indianapolis.
Offerpad’s plans to go public involve a merger with Supernova Partners, former Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff’s special purpose acquisition company. That deal is expected to close this quarter, spokesperson David Stephan said in an email.
The company also announced in June that four high-profile industry voices would join its board of directors upon the merger.
Prior to this week’s announcement, Offerpad had for years operated in the northwestern corridor of South Carolina, including the Greenville, Spartanburg and Rock Hill areas.
Offerpad said that as part of the expansion into the Columbia area, it plans to continue hiring real estate agents and other local specialists. The company is also pushing to partner with other Columbia-area agents, who can earn a 3 percent referral fee by directing their clients to sell their home to Offerpad.
Major iBuyers have been a growing portion of the home market, but have yet to become dominant players, according to Redfin, a national brokerage firm that tracks this subset of the industry and offers its own iBuyer product.
In the first quarter of this year, roughly 1 in 200 homes in Redfin’s study were purchased by an iBuyer — a number that was up from the previous quarter but had yet to eclipse its highest point in late 2019. Major iBuyers have yet to account for 1 percent of the overall home market.