Dive Brief:
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Online home-selling platform Knock, which has offices in Atlanta, New York City, and San Mateo, CA, has raised $32.5 million in a Series A funding round led by RRE Ventures, according to TechCrunch.
- The company, which takes a 6% cut of a home’s sales price in exchange for promising to sell it within six weeks at market rate or else buy it outright, launched in Atlanta in 2015 and targets homes valued from $150,000 to $500,000.
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The company uses predictive analysis to set prices, joining a host of other online real estate companies that have added a layer of technology to home sales.
Dive Insight:
Investors are turning an eye toward the online real estate business.
Knock’s San Francisco-based rival Opendoor announced late last year that it had raised $210 million in Series D funding, which it says will help it expand to 30 cities by 2018 from two currently. Meanwhile, online home sales platform OfferPad last week garnered $260 million in equity and debt funding to continue growing its footprint.
Online real estate companies are growing in popularity, particularly among younger buyers, as they try to streamline the home selling and buying process through the use of technology.
In January, real-estate listing website Realtor.com announced plans to add new features to its Android mobile app that will allow users to access project details from their smartphones in the field.
That followed news from rival Zillow that it had upgraded its real estate app to allow users on iOS-based mobile devices to share photos and information on available properties using iMessage.
Online real estate companies are increasingly adding new features and moving into different areas of the sales and purchase process with Redfin announcing last week that it is expanding into the mortgage lending business.
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