Singapore-headquartered proptech startup Propeller is on a mission to make real estate transactions efficient and informed for both sellers and buyers. Its platform can tell users the possibility of conversion at every stage. Today, Propseller announced it has raised $12 million in Series A funding led by Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia and India.
Other investors participating in the round include returning backers Hustle Fund, Iterative and Rapzo Capital, along with new investors Partech, ICCP SBIT, Vulpes Ventures and Redbadge Pacific. It also includes several prominent protech founders such as PropertyGuru’s Jani Rautianen, OpenAgent’s Marta Higuera, Today’s Steffen Wicker and Tushar Garg of Flyhomes.
In the year Founded in 2018, Propeller will use its Series A to scale its business model, expand its offerings (including services such as mobility) and enter overseas markets. It currently has about 50 employees, including about 20 real estate agents (or consultants, as the startup calls them), and plans to hire 200 more people for its marketing, operations, products, engineering and sales and real estate teams.
By using technology to make the real estate buying/buying process more efficient, Propseller can charge just 1% commission, as opposed to 2% for traditional real estate agencies, founder and CEO Adrian Jorge told TechCrush.
Growing up in Nice, France, George became interested in real estate. People from his family became either engineers or real estate agents, and he noticed that the latter group made more money than the engineers. Curious, Jorge joined his mother’s real estate agency at the age of 14 and stayed there until he was 22. But when his grandfather asked if he wanted to take over the business, Jorge decided not to.
One of the reasons is that the typical real estate agency model is difficult to scale and charges commissions that are manual and often difficult to explain. Instead, George went on to work for technology companies, including six years in the group as general manager of Southeast Asia.
While looking for investment opportunities, George encountered the problem of buying real estate in Southeast Asia. For example, property prices are often high, but the service provided by traditional brokers often leaves much to be desired. This is due to the fragmentation of the real estate market in Southeast Asia and the fact that there are 200,000 agents in Southeast Asia who only close two transactions per year on average.
As a result, George saw an opportunity to build a platform that would help people sell their homes quickly, transparently and with minimal effort.
Propseller calls licensed real estate agents consultants because the company’s automation system gives them time to work on client relationships. On average, ProSeller Consultants close about 55 sales transactions per year, which means they earn more.
We are the only company in Singapore that can tell you the expected conversion rate of a buyer lead coming from PropertyGuru. 99. Co” said George. This means that lead generation can be tracked from start to finish, so salespeople and consultants know how successful they are at closing at each stage of the process.
Viewings are generally done offline, but Propeller does video and VR viewings for each property. Sellers can stay on top of progress with a dashboard that shows what channels their property is being distributed on, inquiries generated, scheduled viewings and offers.
The Covid pandemic has made people more willing to buy big-ticket items online, and many people working from home are looking for bigger properties. As the epidemic slowly subsides, George believes these trends will continue.
The company’s main competition is the 34,000 independent agents in Singapore, which own 99% of the real estate market share. Proptech’s competitors include My Own Home, and Blue Nest in Singapore, Red Fin in the US and Flyhomes to some extent, George said.
PropSeller is an independent integration with an end-to-end real estate marketing platform, George said. “We broke down every step of the process, documenting everything that happened and were able to document information that no one else had and identify how to improve the process to get better results.”
In a prepared statement, Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia and India Managing Partner Carmen Yun said Propeller is “using technology and data to revolutionize the way we market our homes in a more cost-effective and time-efficient manner. We’ve followed the Propeller team for over two years, and over the years have seen their incredible tenacity and They have progressed.
