Entera, a real estate technology company that caters to investors, has secured a $7.5 million funding round, a prize that will position the company to expand into new markets, draw larger investors and grow its tech team and platform.
Martin Kay | Photo credit: Entera
Martin Kay, the co-founder and CEO of Entera, founded the company because he recognized that making decisions and winning in real estate at a large scale has not always been easy for investors. Kay, who comes from a real estate data background, said he was amazed at everything that goes into the decision of how and when to buy a house.
“If you’re a consumer and you’re buying one house every 10 years, it’s a different kind of, how do I make a decision and how can I be successful?” Kay told Inman. “It’s a very different kind of problem than if you’re trying to buy one house an hour or one a week or one a month.”
Entera is a platform for investors, not the average consumer. It’s broken into three separate modules. The first, Kay compared to Match.com, or how Netflix and Spotify make recommendations, using machine learning to understand what the investor is looking for in a home, like characteristics, schools, neighborhoods, etc.
Then Entera collects as much data about homes for sale as it can. It uses MLS data, but also has relationships with iBuyers, auction houses and brokerages that list off-market properties.
“We don’t have any particular preference of source, but our goal is to get 100 percent coverage,” Kay said. “The goal is just to get as much of that real estate exposed as possible.”
The third focus for Entera is managing the transaction. Entera employs a full-service real estate brokerage with agents on the ground in certain markets and has a centralized location in Houston. Kay believes real estate transactions are plagued with problems and the combination of data and humans is the best way to address the issues. Agents, he believes, will continue to play a role in the real estate industry.
“We have what is kind of a full-service kind of transaction group who negotiates, manages services in the field, goes through that closing process, interacts with that title and lending and inspection and constructs all the different kinds of things,” Kay said. “And that’s all integrated directly into the platform.”
Kay envisions a scenario where an investor gets an alert when a new property comes onto the market that fits exactly what they’re looking for in a home. The investor can make a decision in three minutes and have an offer in on the home in five.
Overall, Entera boasts that its platform offers access to 20 percent more properties, helps investors make more confident decisions and win twice as many properties at a rate 2.5 times faster than the traditional real estate process.
“Similar to brokerages like E-Trade and Charles Schwab, Entera delivers 100 percent cloud-based enterprise-level solutions that enable investors to make the best decisions and buy with ease,” Kay said.
The funding round was led by Bullpen Capital and Craft Ventures, with additional participation from ValueStream Ventures and Chris Heller, the current chief real estate officer of OJO Labs and the former CEO of Keller Williams.
“Real estate markets have long since moved online, but prior to Entera, there was no unified platform designed for professional real estate buyers and funds, a large and growing segment, to find, price or transact,” Eric Wiesen, general partner at Bullpen Capital, said in a statement. “As more professional capital moves into residential real estate, companies like Entera, who provide leading technology and tools and a highly experienced team will play a critical role.”
