The path to founding Perchwell started in the 2008 financial crisis.

I graduated college in 2008 and moved to New York to work in finance, just as the financial crisis was taking hold. It was a wild introduction to the real world — nearly every day things previously thought to be “impossible” were happening and rumors predicting the end of the financial system were everywhere. Like most people, I was scared — I had a mountain of student debt and no plan B if I lost my job.

As the fallout got worse, I became increasingly interested in the real estate market. I was curious how things could have gone so wrong for so long without anyone seeming to notice. People were talking about the “next Great Depression” and this had all just… come out of nowhere? That seemed odd. So I started digging into whatever data I could find to try to wrap my head around the market. I focused on NYC in particular because I was in love with the city and wanted to own a piece of it as soon as I could.

I quickly found that it was quite difficult to quantify even basic drivers of the market. I was surprised — real estate was the world’s largest asset class so I assumed there would be plenty of sophisticated data tools comparable to what you have in other areas such as stocks and bonds. On the contrary, real estate data was extremely siloed such that even getting access to it, much less making sense of it, was not really possible.

The problem we are solving

The deeper I looked, the more interested I became in solving that problem. So I learned to code and started compiling data from a variety of sources myself. I tracked the data over time, looking at everything from pricing dynamics in buildings with certain amenity profiles to the development trajectories of entire neighborhoods — all foundation data analytics compiled in a simple UI. I knew I may be onto something when an agent I was working with asked to borrow the tool I had created.

After a few years, it really clicked for me that there was an opportunity. Real estate is one of the most common professions in the US, and yet very few technology companies have emerged to serve the industry. The average American has over 50% of their wealth tied up in their home, so real estate transactions are among the most consequential financial decisions of most people’s lives. With such high stakes, it is critical to have a true expert in the mix. Agents serve an important advisory role to their buyers and sellers and should be empowered with the tools they need to drive the best outcomes for their clients. Shouldn’t there be better options than spreadsheets?

Enter Perchwell

The market need seemed clear, but our first few years were grueling. Most people I spoke to in real estate said the idea would never work and I should not waste my time. Countless companies had tried to build software for agents and fallen flat. The industry had a reputation for being slow to accept new technology and resistant to outsiders, but soon thereafter, brokerages started demanding the product for their agents too.

We had an awesome team who believed wholeheartedly in what we were building so despite all the advice about why Perchwell would not work, we pushed ahead and launched our brokerage product in 2018. We got traction quickly and soon counted many of NYC’s top firms as customers. We have since grown our NYC customer base over 50 brokerages — thousands of agents use Perchwell’s web and mobile apps daily for everything from syndicating listings to analyzing the market to collaborating with clients.

Additionally, in 2020 Perchwell was selected to operate its Residential Listing Service, which is the data platform that the entire NYC industry relies on to distribute and access data. That was a major milestone for us — in just a few years we went from a obscure startup that nobody thought would work to playing a foundational role in the most complex and competitive real estate market in the country. Things were working.

Perchwell’s future

Having honed Perchwell in NYC, we started to get a lot of demand from customers in other geographies. Given the critical role Perchwell plays in the day-to-day workflows of our customers, our strategy had always been to truly nail things in NYC before expanding. In 2021 we finally felt we were ready to scale nationally and we decided to fundraise.

Founders Fund lead our Series A, alongside Lux Capital, Matterport and California Regional MLS (CRMLS). We announced the investment last week and we will use the funds to scale to serve agents nationwide. We are building our team and hiring for a variety of roles including product, engineering, design, customer success, marketing, and operations.

We are living in a unique time and as we move into the new year, I believe real estate technology is having its moment in the sun. All signs indicate competition in the real estate market will continue to be fierce in 2022. The remote work shift is reshaping how Americans think about where they want to live and the opportunities for agents to help people navigate that shift will be incredible.

We are just getting started here at Perchwell, and our mission is to build the next generation of technology for agents to best serve their clients and thrive in this crazy market.

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