Homesnap, based in Rockville, Maryland, began as a consumer-facing app for displaying information about local homes but has shifted its core focus to U.S. real estate agents. The platform aggregates hard-to-find data and real-time MLS listings across 125 metropolitan areas and has registered about 400,000 real estate agents; close to 75 percent of them are said to be using it. MLS groups pay Homesnap on a per-agent, per-month basis while agents get Homesnap Pro for free. Agents can also pay Homesnap to run online marketing campaigns on Facebook and Google, with ads that can be created in less than a minute thanks to imported listing data. Financially, Homesnap has raised a total of $32 million to date, including the latest Series B; prior funding includes investment from Revolution, the venture firm started by AOL co-founder Steve Case. The company says it will use the new funding to further build out undisclosed “premium” products and continue developing its agent-focused mobile operating system. Sawbuck Realty builds HomeSnap, a mobile-first real estate product that uses iPhone sensors and a large property database to identify homes and surface MLS and public-record details from a photo. The company also operates a real-estate website with over a million uniques per month and maintains a blended database of property records and MLS data. Since its March launch the HomeSnap iPhone app has been downloaded about 200,000 times and currently connects roughly 3,000 users and real estate agents per month. Today the company monetizes by connecting buyers to local agents and collecting referral fees, and it is exploring additional revenue opportunities such as refinancing alerts and partnerships. Planned product work includes Facebook Open Graph integration, expanded condo/co-op and rental support, added local demographic and housing-market data, and an iPad app by year-end and Android in Q1 2013. Sawbuck Realty's core product is HomeSnap, a mobile app that lets users discover information about any home by taking a photo and using the iPhone's accelerometer, gyroscope and GPS combined with patent-pending algorithms. The app pulls data from MLS where available and from public records otherwise, and the company says its database already contains over 90 million homes. Sawbuck currently has MLS coverage for 13 of the largest U.S. metro areas and plans to expand aggressively, targeting 30 top markets by year-end. HomeSnap stores a history of users' "snaps" to help users recall homes and to build a crowd-sourced photo database. The company says future enhancements could include image-recognition using those crowd-sourced photos. The app is positioned for serendipitous discovery rather than detailed price research and is framed as a competitor to Zillow; it is available on the iTunes App Store.

Total raised

$20M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Series B

Latest activity

Feb 2018