Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
TripleMint, a New York City-based startup aiming to take the pain out of buying, selling and renting an apartment, has raised $1.65 million in seed funding.
Investors include Dominion Capital, Winklevoss Capital (yes, those Winklevoss twins), Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, Kima Ventures, Archangel Ventures, Fabrice Grinda, Tom Falus (former president of Cushman & Wakefield) and Mike Albanese (publisher of the New York Observer), TechCrunch reports.
TripleMint used to be called Suitey, but the company felt pressured into changing its name. Co-founder David Walker explained to Buzzfeed that the old name was “really hard to say and spell,” creating “a bit of a word-of-mouth issue.”
Indeed, TripleMint is a lot cleaner and we can’t think of alternative spellings.
BuzzFeed explains that the new name has its own issue, though. It’s also the name of a real estate brokerage in Austin. Although the recently funded startup owns the TripleMint.com web domain, the Austin firm has the matching twitter handle.
The name change also signifies TripleMint’s expanded services, adds TechCrunch. The core is still the same — it allows prospective buyers and renters to search their local broker database directly. Then, once you’ve found the apartments that you want to check out, you don’t have to contact a long list of different brokers. Instead, a single TripleMint broker can help you tour all of them.
Those brokers, by the way, are actually full-time employees with benefits and equity in TripleMint. And perhaps most importantly for customers, they’re not just paid on a straight commission basis. They also receive a bonus based on customer satisfaction, so there’s less incentive to pressure you to just make the deal.
“When you look at real estate from the pure technology lens, there’s a ton of focus and a lot of companies that are media companies centered around selling ads on listing search pages,” Walker told TechCrunch. “And very few have really focused on the actual consumer experience.”
As for features beyond the real estate brokerage, TripleMint also offers a concierge moving service, with discounts for local service providers. And it’s announcing that it will donate a portion of the revenue from each transaction to Rebuilding Together NYC, a nonprofit that helps low-income families stay in their homes.
TripleMint is currently available in the NYC boroughs of Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn, with a particular focus on Manhattan, Walker said. and yes, there are plans to expand, although he didn’t offer any details about the timing.
