Austin—An Austin real estate startup is using technology to become a better matchmaker between buyers and sellers of properties, and has raised $27 million to expand its market.
Opcity received the investment in a Series A round led by Palo Alto, CA-based Icon Ventures, with participation from Georgian Partners in Toronto, and Austin’s LiveOak Venture Partners.
“We need to hire pretty much every role that exists; we need a recruiter to help hire those people,” says Ben Rubenstein, Opcity’s founder and CEO (pictured, left.) “We don’t have anybody in marketing and we’ve done very little branding. We need more people on the engineering team and in data science.”
Opcity, which was founded in 2015, uses analytics to increase the likelihood that a sale happens once a real estate agent and a buyer are connected. That happens when the two parties are more closely matched to each other, Rubenstein says.
Right now, interested buyers go to a site like Zillow or Trulia, express interest in a property, and wait for an agent to respond. Those interactions don’t result in sales as often as they should, he says: “That agent might not be a good fit for you.”
Opcity’s algorithms scores agents who work for its customers, which are large brokerages such as Remax and Century 21, in an attempt to create a profile that might best help a certain customer.
“We score our agents, the locations they work, the price points they work in, if they cater to empty nesters or first-time buyers or people moving in from out of town, what languages do they speak,” Rubenstein says.
Using Opcity, when a potential buyer clicks online to speak to an agent, the software takes all that scoring into account and automatically texts agents who are top matches in order. “We bridge the call, help set up an appointment for tomorrow to see the property,” he says. “The technology
