Real estate software company Elm Street Technology (EST) continued its rapid expansion this month with the acquisition of marketing automation startup eMerge and the launch of a new full-service marketing agency called “3sixtyfive.”
Clients of eMerge subscribe to the service, which automatically sends out messages on a variety of topics to their contacts, Prem Luthra, President and CEO of EST, told Inman.
Elm Street Technology founder Prem Luthra.
“They’d be able to go into the system, upload their rolodex, if you will, and then select specific campaigns that would go out to their client base,” Luthra explained.
Luthra said that EST had already been doing some automated messaging, but eMerge’s capability took “it to a whole different level.” The company, he continued, had thousands of templates that included letters, emails, and even texts.
The services and content library eMerge built will now be incorporated into EST’s offerings, which focus on online marketing, lead generation, and client management solutions for brokers and agents.
“Everyone knows if you have dynamic content on a website it’s going to rank favorably with search engines,” Luthra said. “But what Realtor do you know who has the time to post content to a blog? So we do that for them. We push that content out onto their blog.”
The eMerge acquisition is the fifth such deal EST has done since launching in 2016. Others include Listingbook, an MLS data powered CRM platform, and Consolidated Knowledge, which provided expertise in branding, online marketing, and other services.
EST’s 3sixtyfive, meanwhile, “will provide high-level marketing consulting, campaign development, execution and analysis for the real estate industry.” The agency will draw on EST’s tech acquisitions and allow the company to offer a comprehensive suite of marketing services to real estate professionals.
Luthra said that EST services are targeted at smaller teams that have “limited marketing staff, or no staff at all.” It’s a niche that seems to be working for the company, with Luthra saying that they currently have “30,000 broker and team customers” spread across the US and, as of recently, Canada.
The company also has ambitious goals to grow in the coming year.
“We want to double our size in 2019,” Luthra said.
