Rental-technology company Nestio has closed a $1.5 million financing round that the company says will enable it to develop and expand Nestio Listings, a recently launched real-time listings management system that enables a property manager to update listings, display those listings on a public-facing website, and disseminate them to brokers.
Nestio said the financing round was led by Joanne Wilson, with participation by strategic angels, investors with real estate industry experience, and seed/micro venture capital funds. Investors include David Tisch, Jerry Colonna, David Cohen, Rick Webb, Greg Barton (founder of MenuPages), Stuart Litwin (co-founder of SureDeposit), Lazerow Ventures, Quotidian Ventures, Ludlow Ventures, Scout Ventures, Meridian Development Partners and Narbona Hill Corporation.
Nestio touts Nestio Listings, which currently serves only New York City landlords and property managers, as a first-of-its-kind solution to the often-chaotic business of managing rental listings.
The service enables property managers to scrap outdated tools like whiteboards, spreadsheets, Word documents and fax machines and instead use a single database to update listings in real time and surface them on a public-facing website.
“Nestio is giving the real estate market the instantaneous information that the rest of the world is accustomed to receiving every day… and it’s about time,” Wilson said in a statement released by Nestio.
The service also populates email blasts with the same listings, sending them out to brokers who seem to appreciate their accuracy. Nestio said its weekly broker email blasts have a 76 percent open rate and reach 50 percent of the city’s rental agents.
Before unveiling the product, 15 percent of New York City’s property managers already were using Nestio Listings, according to the company. Nestio said it will use the $1.5 million cash jolt to grow its team, beef up coverage in New York City and launch its platform in other markets.
