Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
Real estate investment platform Landis, which enables institutional investors to buy and sell residential real estate, is acquiring the technology assets of a startup called GoldenKey that recently went out of business.
The acquisition was reported by TechCrunch, which said Landis will acquire GoldenKey’s intellectual property and data, but will not take on its workforce.
GoldenKey began life as SoloPro, and unsuccessfully tried to build a business offering “on-demand” real estate services. The idea was to charge a flat fee for such services, and take on the traditional commission-based real estate services model.
GoldenKey secured over $4 million in venture capital funding, securing investments from Lowes Ventures, among others. Unfortunately the company was unable to survive, hence the decision to sell its technology and data to Landis.
According to TechCrunch, GoldenKey’s business model involved offering home sellers either a set of unbundled services (listing, home showing, transaction coordination, etc.) or a flat rate bundle for selling their homes. But the model failed for reasons unknown, illustrating that real estate isn’t an easy market to disrupt.
As for Landis, the company seems to be doing well. It’s aiming at another side of the residential real estate market, helping large scale investors to buy and sell properties. Those investors usually rent out the properties they buy, and can use Landis’ platform to complete each and every step of their transactions.
One main advantage Landis has is that it’s a private platform, meaning it doesn’t have to deal with multiple listing services that often have a regional monopoly on housing listings data.
