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Place co-founder Ben Kinney is operating under the assumption that a recession is inevitable. So he’s aimed to make his business as recession-proof as possible, he said during a session earlier this month at Inman Connect Las Vegas.
Kinney, a longtime real estate agent, laid out his plan for Place during the three-day event — and his thoughts on what brokerages should be doing.
It starts, he said, with having a plan for how a brokerage or other real estate business can survive multiple bad months in a row after enjoying years of uninterrupted sky-high sales.
“I think it’s going to feel like the worst month that you’ve had in the last three years,” Kinney told the Inman audience. “So what you do is you ask yourself, ‘If I had the worst month, every month, could I survive?’”
Even though Kinney has famously raised $100 million from Goldman Sachs, he said Place has been profitable enough on its own that it hasn’t had to spend the money. That puts the company in good position to weather a downturn, he said.
Ben Kinney gives a talk in August at the Inman Connect real estate conference in Las Vegas. (Photo by AJ Canaria of Moxiworks)
As for how he raised money in the first place, Kinney said it was a mixture of persistence and blind luck.
“How do you raise $100 million from Goldman Sachs? You get rejected by every other [venture capital firm] for 12 years, and then get lucky one day,” Kinney said.
Catch the full session in the video at the top of this page.
