happens in a minute or two.”
“The agents are speaking to customers who want to see property in my area of expertise,” Rubenstein adds. (Agents pay a commission from the sale worked out between their brokerage and Opcity. Rubenstein declined to say what those commissions are.)
Opcity’s system will “learn” from the activities between the buyers and sellers and update itself in real time, Rubenstein says. So far, Opcity has about 350 brokerages with more than 4,000 agents using its platform, the company says.
Opcity is part of a growing community of tech companies catering to the real estate market. Most recently, Roomored said it would work with a yet-to-be-built senior living center to use virtual reality to help prospective tenants visualize the living spaces, according to Dallas Innovates. The startup aims to digitize the paint, wood, and fabric swatches used in interior design to allow homebuyers to have access to the sort of customized design typically available only by custom home builders, according to the post.
Another Texas real estate startup, The SquareFoot, which is an online platform for commercial real estate, moved from Houston to New York following a fundraising of $2 million in 2015.
Rubenstein had previously founded Yodle, an online marketing startup for small business, at age 21 when attending the University of Pennsylvania. An acquisition brought him to Austin
in 2011 and he sold Yodle to web.com in 2016 for $342 million. “I really missed the early days of entrepreneurial life and I wanted to start another company again,” he says.
Opcity had previously raised $1 million from friends and family and sees this much larger fundraise as key to the firm’s success.
“This is something that has grown organically on a smaller scale,” Rubenstein says. “We thought, let’s put some real resources into this and soup up the technology and bring it to many more brokerages.”
