For many Americans, buying a home is the epitome of the American Dream. Unfortunately, it can also seem like an unachievable goal for some. Whether it’s excessive debt, the sheer cost of buying a home or just not knowing where to start, it’s easy to see why.
DTLA-based Nestigator wants to change this. With its collaborative real estate platform, the site allows potential buyers to include their friends, family and, of course, their real estate agent in the home buying process, creating a dream team to tackle what will likely be the biggest purchase in the buyer’s lives.
“In the case of real estate, there's the agent who's supposed to be a real contributor, but the way that people search these days, it's hard to integrate the agent into the online search experience,” said Founder and CEO Jerry Slavonia. “We're in it because we believe that people don’t search alone, and creating a tool where you can integrate the people who matter most, including the real estate agent, who have sort of been disenfranchised from the process, is a significant innovation.”
Nestigator’s origins can be traced back to the dark days of the dot-com bubble. Slavonia was a part of the Rent.com team just after the bubble burst in the late-1990s. At the time, he was joining one of the only venture capital-backed tech companies in the LA area.
“When the dot-com bubble burst, it felt like the world had exploded, and from a tech standpoint in LA, it kind of did,” said Slavonia. “Rent.com was a make it or break it in the truest sense because we had this understanding that if we couldn't figure it out with the capital we had on-hand, it was really over. But within a year, we were cash flow positive, and I thought that was going to be impossible.”
As successful as Rent.com became, Slavonia said one of the site’s biggest flaws was what influenced him to start Nestigator.
“As successful as Rent.com was as a service, it never had the menu to satisfy me as a customer because it was a very specific type of property that I didn't have any interest in,” said Slavonia. “Now we have the ability to create this collaborative process and use data to make it more efficient.”
Nestigator’s platform allows users to search for homes like any other real estate search site, but the searches are tracked and shared with the searcher’s real estate agent, allowing the agent to make more personalize recommendations based on the person’s preferences. If the potential buyer wants to include a significant other or a family member in the process, their searches are tracked the same way, providing the real estate agent with valuable information.
As the LA real estate tech scene diversifies and more and more startups develop platforms designed to enable would-be homebuyers, some believe the future of real estate does not involve real estate agents. Slavonia is not one of them.
“Personally, I would never buy a house, especially in LA, without representation,” said Slavonia. “As we embarked on this journey, we spoke with a lot of real estate agents and they really did feel that the larger players in the space were trying to eliminate them from the search process and even from the transaction. Nestigator was built to not only make the home buying process better but to empower the buyer and the agent.”
In April 2015, the startup closed a $3 million Series A. The round’s contributor, Velocity, is based in Pittsburgh, something Slavonia sees as significant.
“From an investor standpoint, I think Los Angeles is so rich with success stories that you're seeing investment groups from outside the area take a look at companies that are starting here because of how successful the community has become,” said Slavonia. “I moved to LA in 1999 and it’s amazing how far the tech landscape has come. It’s amazing, I feel like this is what it must have felt like to be one of the early people in Silicon Valley.”
Image via Facebook.
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