Real estate technology, also known as PropTech, is exploding.
PropTech, short for property technology, is the technology that simplifies the process of buying, selling, renting, owning, or managing a home. There are huge opportunities in this field, which is why over the past 5 years, annual investment in U.S. PropTech companies has grown at a rate five times that of the average, according to Inc. magazine.
Real estate technology has created more value and spawned more unicorns than any other single industry sector, according to Brendan Wallace of Fifth Wall, the largest venture capital firm dedicated to the real estate industry. A “unicorn” company, you’ll recall, is a privately held startup company valued at over $1 billion.
In the first half of 2019, venture capital firms poured $14 billion into real estate technology companies, surpassing the total invested in the space last year.
Below we take a look at the biggest-earning companies from 2019 and a look at what they do.
Compass – $370 million
Compass is a real estate listing platform built with the needs of real estate agents in mind. Agents are always looking for ways to save time, and Compass helps them do it by providing built-in marketing software and automating multi-platform listings.
Lemonade – $300 million
Lemonade, simply put, is the Uber of renters and homeowners insurance. It reduces prices by replacing brokers with bots and algorithms and allows you to get a policy in roughly 5 minutes. On ease of use alone, Lemonade is likely to make off with a big chunk of traditional insurer’s business in the form of millennials.
Opendoor – $300 million
A truly disruptive startup, Opendoor buys homes directly from sellers in exchange for cash, which helps the consumer make a down payment on their new home. Opendoor offers DIY open houses that anyone with a smartphone can attend.
Clutter – $200 million
Not directly involved in real estate but in an ancillary market, Clutter makes it easy to pack, store and move users’ belongings and track their inventory online. Clutter is about to roll out a great feature for hoarders: Users will be able to look at all the items in their house in digital fashion and decide with the click of a button to move, sell or donate.
Nextdoor – $170 million
Nextdoor makes it easy for people to get to know their neighbors, share neighborhood updates and gossip, find babysitters, ask questions, borrow things from each other — basically all the things that neighbors used to rely on one another for before technology made us so self-sufficient.
Better – $160 million
Like Rocket Mortgage from Quicken Loans, Better streamlines the mortgage process. Unlike anything Quicken, or any other mortgage lender, Better also provides mortgages free of commissions and fees. All you pay is interest.
Partner with Lakeside Title
At Lakeside Title, we use the latest technology to keep you on schedule and ensure your closings are streamlined and worry-free. We also keep ourselves on schedule by proactively identifying and resolving title issues before they cause delays.
To learn more about our many services, please visit our homepage today!