REAL ESTATE TECHNOLOGY,REAL ESTATE INVESTMENT
Lessen | January 17, 2023
Lessen, the leading tech-enabled outsourced property services platform, recently announced the strategic acquisition of facilities maintenance technology leader SMS Assist.
By combining the complementary strengths of both organizations, Lessen will continue to address real estate's pain points, offering its clients a scalable, tech-enabled enterprise solution for residential and commercial services. As a result, the companies will serve around 250,000 residential and commercial properties nationwide, enabling approximately 2.5 million repair and maintenance orders annually, in addition to expanding their property services.
The transaction is completed with stock and cash, with Lessen raising roughly $500 million in combined new debt and equity. SMS Assist stockholders exchanged a portion of SMS stock for Lessen stock, resulting in a combined company valuation of over $2 billion. Debt and equity investors, including Värde Partners, Monroe Capital, and Koch Real Estate Investments, assisted with this transaction. Invitation Homes and American Homes 4 Rent are among the clients who invested in the deal with Lessen.
Following the conclusion of the transaction, Lessen's Jay McKee will continue to serve as Chairman of the Board of Directors and CEO of the newly-merged company. He states, "Lessen recognized early on the opportunity to provide an enterprise-level solution that solved the real estate industry's long-tenured property services pain points." He added, "This deal demonstrates the increasing demand within the underpenetrated, $330 billion addressable North American property services market for a unified, extensible delivery platform that provides transparency, efficiency and data-driven insights for the entire real estate ecosystem including investors, owners, managers and service providers.
(Source – Business Wire)
The new, unified technology platform will allow various service providers—from painters, contractors, and plumbers to electricians and more—to work as one on a national scale, which was previously impossible. The quality of this work will be supervised and inspected by Lessen's in-house project managers. This integrated solution will assist owners in overcoming skilled labor shortages while lessening administrative burden, enhancing project efficiency, and providing real-time project updates.
About Lessen
Lessen is the only end-to-end tech-enabled solution for outsourced real estate property services that delivers consistency, quality, and speed at scale, focusing on single-family and multifamily rental renovations, turns, and maintenance. Through automation and real-time analytics, the firm's technology suite is disrupting and modernizing a project management space that is still reliant on traditional organizational and communication models. The company's professional field project managers provide on-the-ground service, utilizing a network of verified service professionals in over 40 markets across the country, all powered by its proprietary technology platform.
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REAL ESTATE INVESTMENT, MORTGAGE AND LENDING
Roc360 | March 16, 2023
Roc Capital Holdings LLC (Roc360), a financial services platform for residential real estate investors, recently announced its completion of the previously announced acquisition of Finance of America Commercial (FACo) assets. Under the transaction terms, Roc360 acquired the operational assets of FACo, a Finance of America Companies Inc. division specializing in residential real estate investment loans.
Roc360 will give the brand a unique logo and execute it under a new subsidiary using its current name, Finance of America Commercial. It will join Roc360's growing collection of leading real estate’s brands, such as Haus Lending, Roc Capital, Elmsure Insurance, Wimba Title, and Tamarisk Appraisals. The FACo acquisition enhances Roc360's existing origination footprint in its retail and wholesale channels, and the acquired data will contribute to Roc360's data science initiatives. In 2022, the two companies collectively financed over $4.6 billion in loans for business purposes.
FACo traces its origins back over a decade to its forerunners, B2R Finance, Dwell Finance, and Jordan Capital Finance, innovators in the national private lending sector that provided fix-and-flip and landlord DSCR loans to real estate investors. It has funded over $6 billion to 9,000+ individual guarantors across 25,000+ closed loans via its broker channels and borrower-direct.
Arvind Raghunathan, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Roc360, said, "Roc360 is committed to delivering innovative products and services that help rejuvenate and deliver new and like-new energy efficient homes to America's undersupplied housing stock." He also said, "The acquisition further broadens our reach and ability to make a difference. We will continue to pursue growth opportunities, including acquisitions, that expand our ability to provide solutions to real estate investors."
(Source – Cision PR Newswire)
About Roc360
Roc360 is a vertically integrated platform for residential real estate investors and one of the leading creators of business-purpose loans nationally. The company was established in 2014, employs more than 300 people and funded more than $14 billion in loans through its lending subsidiaries. It is based in New York City with offices across three continents. In addition, Roc360 joined the Deloitte Technology Fast 500, a ranking of the 500 North American companies with the fastest-growing media, technology, telecommunications, fintech, life sciences, and energy tech industries in 2022.
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REAL ESTATE TECHNOLOGY, AGENT
Businesswire | March 27, 2023
Cloze, an AI-based intelligence provider focused on the real estate market, announced today that Brown Harris Stevens (BHS), the premier privately held real estate brokerage, has successfully rolled out Cloze CRM as part of its market-leading BHSOne initiative. Within just six weeks, adoption of Cloze CRM has overachieved its initial targets, driven initially by a highly successful internal marketing campaign that itself used Cloze, and fueled further by agent-to-agent recommendations from early adopters.
“We looked at many different CRMs, and Cloze gave us three clear reasons why it was the only partner for us,” said Matthew Leone, chief marketing officer at Brown Harris Stevens. “First, there was no barrier to entry. We were amazed at how easy it was to log in, create an account, and get onboarded. Second, you can access all of its functionality through its mobile application—our agents are in front of their phones 100% of the time. And finally, the integration of artificial intelligence was a game changer. We’ve seen how it can as a virtual assistant suggest the proper prospecting steps and touchpoints with everyone in their sphere of influence leading to a higher engagement rate.”
In contrast to typical CRMs that expect agents to constantly update and log their activities and contacts into the system, Cloze silently manages that busywork in the background without disrupting an agent’s daily workflows. Through the insights extracted from agent communications, Cloze CRM flags action items and due dates and recommends how, when, and why to reach out to new and previous clients, highlighting special events, birthdays, or anniversaries, for example, or bubbling up contacts that could benefit from outreach.
“Cloze is by far the best CRM I have ever used,” described Holly Smith, an agent affiliated with BHS’ Palm Beach office. “The AI features are amazing. It reminds you each morning who you need to follow up with, logs and attaches all calls and emails to a contact, and even writes emails for you with AI.”
As part of an internal use case, BHS’ marketing team used Cloze to increase email engagement rates from 10-20% to 80-100% by delivering customized, relevant content to each of the brokerage’s 2,500+ agents. Such customization was made possible because Cloze combines a robust template library with automated processes and AI-generated insights, making it simple to provide highly customized content relevant to each recipient and to do so at scale. The result has been the ability to reach more people in less time with more authenticity.
“Our goal was to provide a tool that would make our agents and managers more efficient in communicating while helping them keep on top of tasks, even as they’re managing multiple deals at different points in the home-buying process,” explained BHS CTO Chris Reyes. “Cloze not only met those expectations, but exceeded them.”
For more information on how BHS agents are deriving value from Cloze CRM, check out the case study and video interview at https://blog.cloze.com/cloze-crm/cloze-the-ai-driven-game-changer-for-brown-harris-stevens/.
About Cloze
Cloze’s artificial intelligence (AI)-powered real estate platform translates everyday communications into actionable insights that brokerages and their agents use to close more deals, drive higher revenue, and increase profitability. Cloze achieves this by strengthening relationships, reducing manual work, driving a more consistent lead-to-close experience, and improving both marketing ROI and overall closure rates.
Cloze’s full suite of real estate solutions includes Cloze CRM, Cloze Marketing, Cloze Leads, and Cloze AI Insights. To learn more, visit cloze.com.
About Brown Harris Stevens
Brown Harris Stevens (BHS) is one of the most prominent privately-held real estate firms in the world. Established in 1873, BHS has historically dominated the luxury, high-end market. With more than 2,500 agents across the East Coast, the company oversees the sale of marquee properties worldwide, including property management and new development marketing, from its headquarters in New York City and its offices throughout the Tristate area, Palm Beach, and Miami. Learn more at www.bhsusa.com.
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