A real estate technology startup doubled in size this year and is ready to serve its recent influx of new customers with a new funding round.
Tour24 CEO Georgianna Oliver told the Business Journal that her company reached $20 million in total funding since launching in July 2020. That included a $5 million Series B round led by real estate technology venture capital firm RET Ventures, which Tour24 announced Tuesday.
The fundraise came after Tour24 doubled the number of properties and communities across the country it is working with, reaching 525,000 units across over 2,060 multifamily properties this year.
Oliver attributed Tour24’s growth to the increased expectation of self-service options that she believes is becoming prevalent across many services, including retail shopping, food delivery and — as it’s the case with Tour24 — in-person tours of rental apartments.
Self-service “had to be perfected during Covid, and now it’s expected,” she said.
Tour24 charges multifamily owners and operators so they can offer prospective tenants the option to take an in-person tour of the property without a leasing agent present. There’s an upfront cost up to $2,000 to set up a property in Tour24’s system, plus a monthly fee around $2.25 per unit per month.
For people looking to take a self-guided tour of an apartment, Tour24 asks for an ID check, then sends access instruction and a time slot. Prospective tenants then show up in person and get information on apartments via the Tour24 app.
During the tour, visitors are tracked by Bluetooth beacons placed in every room, both for security and data-gathering purposes. After the tour, Tour24 tells apartment owners which rooms and amenity spaces visitors spent more time in.
Questions Oliver gets frequently from her multifamily properties are about tour paths and the data Tour24 can collect. She also hears some concerns that the app is going to replace brokers and leasing agents.
“We’re really just supplementing them after hours and weekends,” said Oliver.
In fact, Oliver said that most of Tour24’s self-guided tours happen on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays; about 60% of people going for them are women.
“It’s really meeting the renters where they want to be met in the process of trying to find a new home,” Oliver said. “We believe that people want to see the place they’re going to live.”
Oliver herself had tried to rent an apartment for her son “sight unseen” and then “regretted” it, she said. She noted that even before Covid, less than 10% of apartments were rented by virtual tour.
Tour24 employs 50 workers, including 20 based in Massachusetts. In the Bay State, the company has offices in both Medfield and Chatham, and counts among its customers property manager Windsor Communities in Boston.
[SOURCE: Boston Business Journal]