Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
Startup Amitree is hoping to make life easier for real estate pros, with the launch of a revamped app called Folio, which is a kind of digital assistant for agents.
The company says its just raised $7.1 million in funding led by Vertical Venture Partners. The round included participation from existing investors, including Accel Partners and Seven Peaks Ventures, and brings total funding to about $13 million.
Amitree has had a fairly unusual history. The company first started out with an app for consumers called Closing Time that was designed to help them navigate the closing process. It was essentially just a to-do list of things that needed to be done to complete the purchase of a home.
Unfortunately the company pretty soon realized that it wouldn’t get many repeat customers, what with home buying being a pretty irregular thing. So instead the makers went back to the drawing board, and came up with Folio for real estate agents.
Amitree’s CEO Jonathan Aizen told TechCrunch that most of the innovation in real estate tech has focused on disrupting the relationship between agents and buyers. But Amitree instead wants to help agents get closer to their clients.
Just like home buyers, real estate agents also have a long list of tasks that must be accomplished in order to close a sale, but in their case it’s more complicated as they’re dealing with multiple transactions at once. Keeping track of all their clients can be a tough task.
Folio is offered as a Google Chrome extension that connects with their email accounts. It acts as a digital assistant, processing all of the agent’s emails to understand what stage they’re at with each transaction they’re handling.
With this knowledge, Folio helps agents to manage their workflow by making folders for each transaction, compiling all of the emails and documentation for each one inside them. This helps agents keep everything more organized and set reminders so everything stays on track.
Amitree says its extension has been downloaded over 30,000 times, managing a whopping 200,000 transactions so far. That accounts for about five percent of all real estate transactions in the U.S., according to Amitree’s own figures.
With the new funding, Amitree is planning a major expansion with new hires on the cards for its data science and engineering teams.
