Innovation is in our DNA at Inman — that’s why we’re excited about August’s Technology and Innovation Month. We’ll kick it off by celebrating the companies and individuals pushing the industry forward with an expanded slate of Inman Innovator Awards at Inman Connect Las Vegas. Then, we’ll continue to celebrate the brightest minds in real estate all month long.
Software company Perchwell has landed a $25 million Series B round of financing, Inman has learned.
Lux Capital, its Series A round leader, also led this round and was joined by REColorado MLS, Starwood Capital Group, Flex Capital, Stellar MLS and Venture MLS.
Venture MLS is a fund launched by the California Regional MLS to combat the control of evolving software vendors by larger, third-party enterprise technology companies. Perchwell was its first investment.
Brendan Fairbanks is Perchwell’s CEO and mentioned in the release he believes the company’s solution elevates ”the way real estate agents convey value to their clients.”
“We provide agents with powerful property-centric data in web and mobile platforms under a single seamless solution, empowering them to deliver accurate, precise guidance at a moment’s notice,” Fairbanks said.
The “modern data and workflow platform for residential real estate” is based in New York City and has been engineering artificial intelligence to shrink workflows for brokerages primarily in how they measure and visualize business performance and market activity and empower agents to drive relationships.
Multiple listing services wanting to better address the needs of members are also given an avenue to engage Perchwell, making it one of the few industry systems to provide products to each level of the industry.
“The platform puts the MLS at the center of a modern tech ecosystem and features listing data enriched with supplemental data sets, plug-and-play APIs, powerful market analytics, and comprehensive mobile apps designed to help agents thrive in today’s ever-demanding environment,” the release stated.
Venture capital has been eyeing real estate software and proptech entrepreneurs carefully over the last two years as the market continues to idle.
Total proptech venture capital investments hit just $1.491 billion in the first quarter of 2024 — a 12.4 percent year-over-year decline from $1.7444 billion in Q1 2023 and a far cry from a peak of $7.444 billion tallied in the first quarter of 2022, data from the Center for Real Estate Technology and Innovation shows.
“This decline can be attributed to a number of economic and geopolitical factors,” Valley Bank President Tom Iadanza said in April 2024. “Rising costs of capital, overall economic unease and fears of geopolitical tension along with changes in supply chains’ speed and cost propelling revisions upward for construction and renovation created a cautious environment. However, proptech investment activity continues to showcase pockets of resilience and represents a critical avenue for the gradual evolution of the global property sector.”
Perchwell’s funds will be put toward the AI components of the system, which is finding its way into almost every aspect of the industry, including home search, inspection, title and lending.
“While other industries rely on integrated software tools to manage their work, real estate professionals still spend much of their time shuffling between disjointed MLS data repositories, search portals, and various other point solutions,” said Peter Hébert, co-founder and managing partner at Lux Capital, in the release. “Perchwell is setting the new industry standard by bringing all that tooling into a complete and modern software platform.”
Hébert will be joining Perchwell’s board of directors.
