The process that millions of agents and thousands of real estate portals around the world use to reach buyers and sellers on digital channels is highly fragmented. Proptech is also clearly lagging behind other industries in leveraging social media to drive sales.
South African startup Flow wants to change the way real estate agents, developers and agents interact with their end customers. Flow uses its API to connect to the real estate agent’s or property developer’s website and automate advertising on social media channels like Instagram and Facebook. The proptech marketing platform has announced that he has raised $4.5 million in pre-series A funding.
proptech plans to use the funds to include other social media platforms such as TikTok and LinkedIn, as well as other advertising channels such as billboards. With this investment, co-founders and co-CEOs Gil Sperling and Daniel Levy will drive his B2B growth strategy for the business, expanding Flow’s social media-driven real estate marketing platform to existing international real estate portals and his CRM platform. integrate into
Sperling and Levy founded Flow in 2017 to develop an app that rewards tenants for early rent payments. However, before Flow, both founders founded Popimedia, an ad tech and performance marketing company. Popimedia was Africa’s largest purchaser of Facebook media inventory for some of the world’s largest brands. They sold his business to global communications group Publicis in 2016, but it was some of the knowledge he gained while running Popimedia that he used to pivot Flow to its current business model four years later. was.
“In our first ad tech business, we never dealt with real estate or property because we couldn’t really serve in this country. [South Africa]And the biggest problem is that as much as real estate is the world’s largest asset class and a very valuable vertical, it’s also very fragmented and therefore the least innovative,” Sperling said. told TechCrunch by phone.
“If you buy or sell a house, take South Africa, for example, there are 40,000 agents pitching 300,000 properties at any one time. , we can’t afford to have a marketing department, a data science department, and a design department like a big company, and that’s one of the reasons why we couldn’t do advertising and performance marketing for many of them. I have.”
With Flow, the founders hope to connect real estate agencies and property developers with their customers on digital channels, which previous startups could not reach. proptech startup automates real estate agent marketing for developers, works with real estate websites like Property24 and Private Property to pull listings and automatically create ads on Facebook, Instagram and other digital channels To do.
According to Flow, the company’s proptech marketing platform improves agent revenue and the experience of real estate buyers and sellers. Meanwhile, Levy points out that startups benefit from these agents using his SaaS platform and cutting some of their marketing costs. He added that revenue has increased 20% month-over-month over the past year.
“Our route to market has mostly been door-to-door, from franchisor to franchisee to various offices within that group. We’ve identified the enterprise channels (what we call them) related to tying technology to portals: “So the next phase of traction and growth will come from relationships that matter in our world. We did this capital raise and essentially experimented with it.”
Flow currently has over 300 clients using its platform. The client is a real estate agency or developer with about 15-20 small agents in each office. More broadly, Flow is used by around 6,000 agents in South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Mauritius and Australia. It is in talks with partners, mainly real estate portals and his CRM platform, to expand in Europe (France, Germany, Belgium, UK) and face tougher competition. Attention to design — but a broader market base.
Futuregrowth Asset Management led Flow’s pre-series A round with $2 million. Endeavor Harvest Fund and serial entrepreneur Stephen Heilbronn joined, and existing investors Karon Venture Partners, Vnani Fintech Fund and Buffet also doubled his investment.
“We have been keenly following Flow’s progress in South Africa and Australia and its integration into the B2B side of the global real estate industry as the next natural step in the company’s evolution.” “We share Daniel and Gil’s vision of leading the real estate industry into his 21st century, and we know they have the expertise and experience to bring it to life. It will bring much-needed change to global industries.”
