With this morning’s housing numbers showing an 11% YoY decline in median home prices and a 9.6 month supply at the current sales rate, this deal raises some eyebrows. Mobile real estate listing company Smarter Agent recently closed a $6.2 million “oversubscribed” first round of funding. The round was led by private equity magnate Ira Lubert, who co-founded Lubert-Adler’s multi-billion dollar real estate fund, LLR Partners, Quaker Bio Ventures and Versa Capital. The funding will support the roll-out of Smarter Agent’s GPS real estate searches including a Homes for Sale application due to launch at the beginning of Spring. Smarter Agent has a service which lets people find houses for rent or sale near where they are when they make the enquiry—it launched on Sprint a year or so ago and gains subscription revenue though a monthly fee. It claims that over 25,000 people used the service over the summer and 35 percent placed calls to the agent/property owner.
That’s a nice-sized investment for the company and should help to get things moving. Right now they’re stagnating with just one carrier, Sprint Nextel (which happens to be bleeding to death right now). Integrating the apps with an ad model should work well. And with one third of users placing calls to owners/brokers there could be a really nice commission model there as well. It would make sense to push the app for free, although the carriers would never let that fly. I’ll bet that Apartments for Rent application will get some good traction with the foreclosure tidal wave upon us…
via MocoNews.net
January 29th, 2008 at 5:38 am
Thanks for the shout out, GPS insider from your readers at www.smarteragent.com
Yes, this year you will see multiple carrier launches, as well as ad support models.
We’re ok with the prospects of this slowing (back to normal) housing market, too. Even in bad times the USA is a very good market as 35 million people will move in 2008 - 33% of renters move each year and 7% of all homes sell every year. The prices will just be less!
Actually a lot of people are searching, trying to figure out pricing, etc. - they just aren’t buying. We make as much money from search as closed deals so the rapid growth of mobile will offset a tanking real estate market.
However, anyone that’s made serious money in real estate knows that all the money is made when things look bad, the home and investment buys made in 2009 and 2010 will probably be the winners - my advice is to wait out spring - summer 2008 (if you can) and buy in the fall, winter when seller pain will be the greatest. Heck, in most places home prices of 2007 are 30% overvalued - a result of greed, really bad underwriting by mortgage companies, and people buying more than they can afford.
January 29th, 2008 at 9:14 am
Great news, Brad - thanks for the update. That should be some well-needed capital to move things along.