The method utilized by tens of millions of brokers and hundreds of assets portals globally to succeed in consumers and dealers on virtual channels is very fragmented. And it’s obvious that proptech, not like different industries, has lagged in using social media to make gross sales.
South African startup Go with the flow needs to modify how actual property businesses, builders and brokers engage with their finish consumers. With its APIs, Go with the flow connects to the internet sites of property businesses and assets builders and automates promoting for them on social media channels like Instagram and Fb. The proptech advertising and marketing platform is saying that it has raised $4.5 million in pre-Collection A investment.
The proptech intends to make use of the investment to incorporate different social media platforms similar to TikTok and LinkedIn and different promoting channels like out-of-home billboards. The funding will see co-founders and co-CEOs Gil Sperling and Daniel Levy power the industry’s B2B expansion technique and combine Go with the flow’s social media–pushed actual property advertising and marketing platform into current global assets portals and CRM platforms.
Sperling and Levy based Go with the flow in 2017 as an app that rewards tenants for early hire bills. Then again, earlier than Go with the flow, each founders up to now constructed an adtech and function advertising and marketing corporate, Popimedia, which used to be the biggest purchaser of Fb media stock in Africa for one of the vital international’s largest manufacturers. Whilst they bought the industry to international communications team Publicis in 2016, it used to be one of the vital wisdom received whilst operating Popimedia that they drew directly to pivot Go with the flow into its present industry style 4 years later.
“With our first adtech industry, we by no means handled actual property or assets as shall we by no means in point of fact carrier them on this nation [South Africa]. And the most important downside used to be that up to actual property is the most important asset elegance on this planet and really precious vertical, it’s the least innovated round as it’s simply extremely fragmented,” Sperling advised TechCrunch on a decision.
“When purchasing and promoting properties, if you are taking South Africa, for instance, 40,000 brokers are advertising and marketing 300,000 listings at any time. Each and every agent is basically slightly small industry as a result of they’re commissioners, and there’s no method that they are able to come up with the money for to every have a advertising and marketing, information science division, and design division like giant companies can, and that’s one explanation why we couldn’t behavior commercials or efficiency advertising and marketing for lots of of them.”
With Go with the flow, the founders need actual property businesses and assets builders they couldn’t succeed in with their former startup to connect to consumers on virtual channels. The proptech startup automates the selling for actual property brokers for builders and works hand-in-hand with actual property web pages similar to Property24 and Non-public Assets to drag listings and routinely create commercials on Fb, Instagram and different virtual channels.
In line with Go with the flow, its proptech advertising and marketing platform improves earnings for brokers and stories for assets consumers and dealers. Alternatively, Levy issues out that the startup makes cash when those brokers use its SaaS platform and by means of a share lower from their advertising and marketing spend. He added that earnings has been rising 20% month-on-month inside the previous yr.
“Our path to marketplace, for probably the most bit, has been going door-to-door from franchisor to franchisee to other workplaces inside of that team. And over the past couple of months, we’ve known the undertaking channel, as we name it, which is extra related to strapping on our generation to portals,” mentioned the co-CEO. “So our subsequent segment of traction and expansion will come from the ones relationships, which might be vital in our international. And that’s why we’ve simply long gone via this capital elevate to experiment with that necessarily.”
Go with the flow lately has over 300+ shoppers the use of its platform — a shopper being an actual property company or developer the place every place of job has about 15 to twenty smaller brokers. So extra widely, Go with the flow is utilized by just about 6,000 brokers throughout South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Mauritius and Australia. It’s in talks with companions, basically assets portals and CRM platforms, to enlarge into Europe (France, Germany, Belgium and the U.Ok.) the place it’ll face stiffer festival — which the co-founders hope Go with the flow will edge out with its generation and a spotlight to design — however a extra in depth marketplace base.
Futuregrowth Asset Control led Go with the flow’s pre-Collection A spherical with $2 million. Enterprise Harvest Fund and serial entrepreneur Steven Heilbron participated, whilst current buyers Kalon Challenge Companions, Vunani Fintech Fund and Buffet Investments additionally doubled down.
“We’ve keenly adopted Go with the flow’s development in South Africa and Australia and integration into the B2B facet of the worldwide assets trade as the following herbal step within the corporate’s evolution,” says Futuregrowth Asset Control head of Non-public Fairness and Challenge Capital, Amrish Narrandes, at the funding. “We proportion Daniel and Gil’s imaginative and prescient to deliver the valuables trade into the twenty first century and know they have got the experience and revel in to make it occur — and we’re happy so that you can be a part of a South African corporate taking daring steps that can deliver much-needed exchange to an crucial international trade.”
