Online homebuying startup Offerpad just closed a Series C funding round, bringing its total money raised to $975 million.
The latest funding round, which includes equity from a new investors along with a debt facility line from Citibank, follows on the heels of a $150 million round raised in May 2018. Offerpad declined to identify exactly how much money it raised and who invested in its latest round.
“Since Offerpad’s early days, we’ve been fortunate to attract the confidence of excellent investors,” Offerpad CEO Brian Bair said in a prepared statement. “Having such positive partnerships with our lasting and new investors presents us with the exciting opportunity and ability to do more for homeowners around the country as we expand.”
Launched in 2015 but officially open for business in 2017, the Arizona-based Offerpad is one of a number of companies also known by the wider category “iBuyers,” which bring technology to the process of buying and selling homes — prospective homesellers visit a company’s website, enter information about the home they wish to sell, and then receive an all-cash offer on their home within days at the cost of a service fee.
However, Offerpad has lagged behind in its funding and market expansions to rival San Francisco iBuyer startup Opendoor, now worth nearly $4 billion and active in 19 markets, and is also facing steep competition from Zillow Offers, the home search giant’s online cash offer program that has announced expansions to over a dozen markets across the country.
The new funding will go towards bringing the iBuyer’s home-sale model to more cities across the country. According to the company, Offerpad doubled the number of its home purchases in both 2017 and 2018, though Offerpad did not reveal how many homes in exact numbers it has purchased.
Offerpad said it plans to be operating in more than 30 cities by the end of next year, compared to Opendoor’s goal of 50 markets nationwide in the same time frame.
Offerpad currently buys homes in Tucson, Phoenix, Atlanta, Tampa, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Charlotte, Raleigh, Dallas-Fort Worth, Tucson, Orlando and Los Angeles.
The company, along with Opendoor, previously had publicly searchable Yelp pages where customers could post reviews, but Yelp has since changed its policy and hidden the pages, raising controversy among the wider real estate industry and brokerages who still have publicly discoverable Yelp review pages.
