Savvy Lane, a startup developing technology and services to help lower the cost of buying or selling a home, announced Friday it has raised $2 million in outside investment to support its growth.
Seattle-based Savvy Lane did not identify the investor that provided the funding, saying only that it came from “a notable public company targeting innovative property tech solutions.”
Savvy Lane plans to use some of the proceeds from the seed funding round to expand its operations along the West Coast, the company says in a news release. According to its website, Savvy Lane currently operates in a total of nine metropolitan markets in Washington, Oregon, and California.
Andrew Miklos and Beata Miklos, a married couple, founded Savvy Lane in 2015 and lead the company as CEO and chief operating officer, respectively.
It’s seeking to use technology to make the process of buying or selling a home cheaper and easier, similar to what Intuit’s (NASDAQ: [[ticker:INTU]]) TurboTax product and H&R Block’s (NASDAQ: [[ticker:HRB]]) software have done for tax filing. (Quicken Loans, which used to be owned by Intuit, is the company behind the home buying-focused software Rocket Mortgage.)
Savvy Lane helps home sellers create listings with accompanying photos, signs, and flyers, and makes these listings visible to groups of real estate brokers. The startup also provides an interactive guide with resources for tasks like cleaning, repairs, and staging in advance of an open house.
Savvy Lane’s pitch to prospective buyers is that they can pay lower commissions on transactions by going through its website compared to other real estate brokerages.
According to company materials, it’s typical for two real estate agents to be involved with a home sale in the US. Savvy Lane believes it can help people buying and selling homes save money by using technology to perform some of the work agents have traditionally performed.
Buyers can make offers directly from Savvy Lane’s software platform, the company says. Its software also has features to help when someone is closing on a home, and can connect users to professionals with expertise in title, escrow, and mortgage services.
The company says it plans to triple its current headcount, to about two dozen, over the next year, says Andrew Miklos.
Other real estate-focused tech companies in the Seattle area include household names Redfin (NASDAQ: [[ticker:RDFN]]) and Zillow (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ZG]]), which show house, condominium, and apartment listings. The sector also includes upstart businesses like Showdigs and Remarkably.
Savvy Lane is seeking to carve out a larger niche at a time when technology has given consumers and professionals access to more property value data and other information than they had previously.
“The market is armed with more data, more digital tools and more insight than ever before,” Miklos says.
