After teasing its plans to become a tech investor last month, California Regional Multiple Listing Service has created a venture fund and invested in its first target: real estate data platform Perchwell, the MLS announced Wednesday.
At the same time, Perchwell announced it has raised $15 million in a Series A round lead by Founders Fund with additional investors Lux Capital and CRMLS also participating. Along with an earlier $4 million seed round, this brings Perchwell’s total funding to $19 million. The company declined to share its implied valuation after this round.
Founded in 2015, Perchwell is a real estate data visualization, search, and collaboration platform for agents and their clients. It’s a “front end” MLS product — “front end” referring to what agents see when they log on — that marries listing information to public and private data sets that provide context to those listings and provides workflow and productivity tools such as custom analytics, reports, listing presentations, client collaboration and contact management.
The deal between CRMLS and Perchwell closed December 1. The companies declined to comment on the amount CRMLS invested in Perchwell or its ownership stake. Founders Fund, which contributed the majority of the round, has also invested in several real estate-related firms, including Hutch, Bungalow, Cover, Harbor, Sundae, Snapdocs, Blend, Cadre, Porch, Compass and Notarize.
CRMLS, the nation’s largest MLS with more than 110,000 agent, broker and appraiser subscribers, said it created its venture fund “as a hedge against changing market forces” in the real estate industry and views new technology investments as “necessary and beneficial” for its subscribers, their clients and the industry at large.
Art Carter
CRMLS is taking this “extraordinary step” to proactively meet its users expectations, CRMLS CEO Art Carter told Inman via email.
“The 100,000+ professionals who rely on CRMLS have a right to…