Simply days after publicly traded actual property tech firms Redfin and Compass laid off a mixed 900-plus workers, one other proptech — HomeLight — is asserting that it has secured $60 million in capital and $55 million in debt financing.
HomeLight’s newest $60 million fairness elevate is an extension of the corporate’s $100 million Sequence D that was introduced final September. At the moment, HomeLight was valued at $1.6 billion. With the extension, the Scottsdale, Arizona-based firm has raised a complete of $645 million since its 2012 inception and is valued at $1.7 billion. Notably, present investor Oren Zeev contributed the entire $60 million.
“This fundraise and acquisition permit us to play each offense and protection — increasing our enterprise whereas additionally positioning the corporate to climate uncertainty this yr and into subsequent yr,” Drew Uher, HomeLight’s founder and CEO, informed Nob6.
The corporate additionally introduced at the moment that it’s buying Accept.inc, a Denver-based lending startup, in an all-stock transaction for an undisclosed quantity. The deal is predicted to shut in coming weeks. Settle for describes itself as an iLender, or a “technology-enabled lender” that offers folks a technique to submit all-cash gives on a house upon qualifying for a mortgage. In June of 2021, Nob6 lined the information that Settle for had secured $78 million in debt and $12 million in fairness. SignalFire led the fairness portion of its financing, which additionally included participation from present seed buyers Y Combinator and DN Capital.
“With our newest acquisition, HomeLight turns into the most important agent-focused energy purchaser within the nation,” the corporate mentioned in an announcement. “Bringing Settle for.inc into the HomeLight household is a strategic transfer that may permit much more of HomeLight’s prime brokers and their purchasers to profit from the ability, pace, and certainty of contingency-free transactions.”
Through the years, like many different actual property tech platforms, HomeLight has developed its mannequin. HomeLight’s preliminary product centered on utilizing synthetic intelligence to match shoppers and actual property buyers to brokers. Since then, the corporate has expanded to additionally providing title and escrow services to brokers and residential sellers and matching sellers with iBuyers. In July 2019, HomeLight acquired Eave as an entry into the (more and more crowded) mortgage lending area.
In January 2020, HomeLight launched its flagship monetary merchandise, HomeLight Commerce-In and HomeLight Money Provide. As of April, HomeLight Money Provide — which operates in California, Colorado, Arizona, Florida and Texas — had seen 500% year-over-year development in transaction quantity, Uher mentioned. And within the first quarter of 2022, HomeLight and Settle for.inc represented greater than $3 billion in mixed referred transaction quantity.
“Our unique objective was to easily take away as a lot friction as attainable for each brokers in addition to their purchasers, however because the market turned extra unstable over the past two years,” Uher informed Nob6, “it changed into one of the crucial essential instruments brokers would make the most of to compete and win of their native markets.”
Uher believes that HomeLight’s newest elevate is an instance of a brand new world “the place flat valuations are the brand new up.”
“It’s a testomony to the energy of our enterprise,” he mentioned.
Acknowledging the struggles that different gamers within the area are presently going through amidst rising mortgage rates of interest and a normal housing market slowdown, Uher added that HomeLight is “watching burn intently.”
“We’ve slowed hiring by way of the top of the yr,” he informed Nob6. “…We’ve continued to prioritize strengthening our operations, profitability, and runway to set HomeLight up for the absolute best future.”
As for the choice to accumulate Settle for, Uher mentioned it was based mostly partially on the truth that extra firms have not too long ago popped up within the proptech area with the objective to assist homebuyers and sellers with varied features of the shopping for and promoting course of and that HomeLight wished to be much more aggressive.
“Our objective over the past yr has been to hyper-focus on strengthening our flagship monetary merchandise to permit our brokers to proceed to compete and win,” he informed Nob6. “We acknowledge how money has continued to be king for consumers and sellers in at the moment’s market, and noticed a possibility to companion with one of many key gamers dominating the money provide market.”
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