Santa Monica-based luxury real estate marketing platform Luxury Presence announced on Tuesday a new $5.4 million Series A funding round, bringing the company’s total funding to $7.53 million since November 2018.
Switch Ventures led the round, which included contributions from Bessemer Ventures, Toba Capital, and investors Gerald Risk, Peter Kelly, Jonathan Ehrlich and Blaine Vess.
Luxury Presence CEO Malte Kramer
“Our 2020 goal is to build a full digital marketing solution for real estate agents looking to build successful, lead-generating digital brands,” Luxury Presence CEO Malte Kramer said in a prepared statement. “2019 was all about building the best real estate website platform in the sector, and I’m so proud of what our team was able to accomplish.”
“Our focus was on how to make beautiful, functional and lead-generating sites that were easily customizable to fit the agent’s needs and demands, and we did just that,” Kramer added.
The $5.4 million will be used to expand Luxury Presence’s engineering, product, and sales teams to help manage an expanding list of enterprise clients and bolster the company’s revenue and client base, which has grown by 300 and 450 percent, respectively, since 2018.
In a phone call with Inman, Kramer elaborated on his 2020 vision for Luxury Presence that includes not only continuing to create stunning websites, but crafting a more complete marketing funnel that boosts his clients’ visibility and profitability.
“In 2019, all of our efforts were toward building the best possible website platform for real estate agents,” he said. “For 2020, we’re looking more comprehensively at the full marketing funnel and making investments in additional tools that will help agents market themselves and their listings.”
For Kramer, that includes strengthening Luxury Presence’s on-demand lead generation services through updating or developing new products that increase website traffic and improve website, online advertising, and email marketing conversions.
“Who we are at the core is a technology company,” he said. “We look at software as a part of everything that we do. We do provide management services as well, but our core products are the software we develop from scratch.”
Although Luxury Presence already has an impressive client list that includes Coldwell Banker’s Jade Mills and independent luxury brokerage Hilton & Hyland, Kramer sees plenty of room for growth in becoming the go-to end-to-end marketing platform for brokerages and agents in a quickly evolving real estate landscape.
“I think real estate agents will remain an integral part of the real estate transaction and the industry is moving toward this world where the consumer has a lot more options than they used to, which also means that they need more guidance,” Kramer noted. “Although the role may be changing, the agent, as a trusted advisor, will actually become more relevant in the future.”
“We just want to give agents the tools to brand themselves digitally, to tell their story to consumers, and explain why they’re the trusted advisor they can work with.”
Are you ready for what the industry holds in 2020? Inman Connect New York is your key to unlocking opportunity in a changing market. At Connect you will gain insight into the future, discover new strategies and network with real estate’s best and brightest to accelerate your business. Create your 2020 success story at Inman Connect New York, January 28-31, 2019.
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