20 innovative real estate startups you should know (2023)

What are real estate startups?

PropTech defines startups that are offering technologically innovative products or new business models for the real estate industry. Using technological advancements, real estate startups are reimagining and reinventing the whole industry. Some real estate startups are seeking to replace real estate professionals with technology, while others are offering support through new and innovative tools and services.

Proptech startups offer several solutions for the real estate markets. There are numerous property search tools, innovative buying solutions, new renting practices, selling alternatives as well as new concept agents and landlord solutions. All these offer customers easy access to reviews, visuals of how the property looks every season, tools to rate the property’s infrastructure, and many more benefits.

The 20 most promising real estate startups  

From renting houses to buying offices, real estate startups come up with solutions that are truly taking full advantage of the digital transformation in this industry. So we’ve created the following list of the industry’s innovators. 

Real Estate Bees

Smart City Locating

Smart City Locating, founded in 2013 in Dallas, is the next real estate startup on the list. Unlike the majority of the companies in the article, this startup isn’t funded by investors, it is in fact privately owned. 

Smart City Locating relies on a hyper-personalized approach, they send their customers custom lists of 4-8 apartments that meet their unique circumstances. Moreover, Smart City finds and negotiates the best property deals to give their clients the best prices.

Thanks to this approach, the brand leverages a powerful word-of-mouth marketing strategy that amplifies its growth even more. And with such focus on the customer as well as providing a high standard of service, this real estate startup will certainly continue to grow.

Zumper

Zumper is a real estate startup that is bringing innovation to the rental sector. Zumper has created the largest rental platform in North America which allows users to make renting an apartment as easy as booking a hotel.

Additionally, their solution offers users the option to get notified instantly when a property that meets their requirements is listed on the market in real-time. Zumper is one of the largest rental platforms in the USA with more than 75 million users annually. From start to finish, this real estate startup is striving to be the end-to-end marketplace for rental properties. 

Fundrise

Fundrise is a real estate startup that has created the modern real estate investment platform. Their platform is making property investing and management easier and more seamless through their easy-to-use website and mobile app. Investors can easily track the performance of their portfolios and watch as properties across the country are bought, improved, and operated via their dynamic asset updates. 

This is making Fundrise one of the most interesting real estate startups to follow with an impressive amount of total assets transaction value of $5B+ to date. Their core motivator is to use technology to make high-quality institutional real estate investments and opportunities available to everyone at a low cost. 

This real estate startup embodies transparency by manifesting its investor-first approach, meaning that they allow investors in the Fundrise real estate portfolios to become shareholders of the company itself. This also shows a unique iPO model and helps the companies to reduce their dependence on external capital whilst also keeping their values and interests aligned to those of their investors. 

Hubble

This UK-based real estate startup is highly focused on configuring, delivering, and managing all of your workspace needs in one place. Whether you are the type of business that needs an office, prefers to work in a coworking space, or is fully remote WFH, Hubble aims to improve the way you do business.

With their extensive office search solutions, Hubble work to help you find your perfect dedicated office space or HQ for your team. They are also considering the needs of more creative and flexible teams that are on the go. Thus, Hubble has handpicked hundreds of the best coworking spaces which you can book at your team’s convenience. 

On top of that, Hubble is not forgetting about the latest WFH trend. They will easily help you create the working from home experience with the amazing teats, virtual experiences, and tips they have curated especially for this type of business. 

Consequently, Hubble ambitiously aims to improve the way your team works through the work environment, flexibility, experience, and tools that will help you understand your team members better. It doesn’t come as a surprise that more than 2.500 companies including the likes of Monzo, Citi Bank, Trustpilot, the NHS, and more trust Hubble for its innovative solution.

Rentberry

Rentberry is a real estate startup that is completely reenvisioning the rental journey by making it fully digital. By making it fully digital and automated, all of the standard tasks that are common for the rental process are made contact-free.

You can complete the entire rental process from submitting personal information all the way to eSigning rental agreements through Rentberry. This makes Rentberry the first closed-loop rental platform that makes the process more transparent and efficient.

Additionally, you can use Rentberry’s custom offer feature that allows you to conduct virtual tours. Moreover, they are also making the rent negotiation process digital by giving tenants direct access to the landlords. 

This approach promptly removes the middleman, thus making the entire process seamless and more profitable for both parties involved. Finally, you can also view proposals and the number of applications for each property, making it easier for you to make an informed decision at a reasonable price.

Consequently, it is becoming common for tenants to use Rentberry as their rental profile by adding their rental history, references, and personalized notes.

Compstak

Data sharing can be a very inefficient process in this industry. However, the next real estate startup on our list dared to envision a different field. Compstak, which was founded in 2011 in New York, is on a mission to change that by providing accurate and transparent data. They achieve this by handling data points weekly to create comprehensive and robust data. Consequently, this led to faster and better deals for everyone.

As a result of such an innovative approach, Compstak has reached rapid growth. To illustrate this growth, the company now has received 4 million comps and leases over 35 billion square feet.

Additionally, their client list is arguably as good as a client list can get with clients for example like Alianz, Empire State Real Estate Trust, Oxford, Moody Analytics etc. Therefore, Compstak can be rightfully considered as the leading crowdsourced commercial real estate data platform in the industry. 

Roofstock

Roofstock, the next real estate startup on the list, makes investing in single-family homes easy. They are driven by their mission to make ownership of investment real estate radically accessible as well as simple and cost-effective. 

To truly give everyone access, Roofstock built a platform that allows entrance to anyone from first-time investors to global asset managers to evaluate, purchase and own residential investment properties. Moreover, this can be done from anywhere in the world. As a result of such a bold approach, the real estate startup recently surpassed over $4 billion dollars in purchases.

Therefore, we can easily say that Roofstock is one of the world’s leading real estate investment marketplace being on Forbes Fintech 50 list for three consecutive years.

Offerpad

Offerpad is a real estate startup that aims to speed up the process of buying or selling a home. To achieve this, Offerpad developed powerful proprietary technology that when coupled with their local and commercial real estate market expertise gives them a competitive advantage to offer personalized customer experiences.

Their unique one-stop Real Estate Solutions Center focuses on giving custom selling solutions, services, and options. Moreover, Offerpad enables two types of home listing services, like express cash offers and flexible listings. Consecutively these solutions empower their customers to sell and buy a home effortlessly and with good ease of mind.

To sum it up, Offerpad is streamlining the entire process making it easy for its customers. 

This can be best illustrated with an example:

• The client requests an offer 
• The company reviews your offer
• The clients decide how they are going to sell while retaining full control

WiredScore

WiredScore, the next real estate startup on our list, is the company that is on a mission to set the global standard for technology in homes. As an example of holding true to its core principles, they created the WiredScore certification. Their digital connectivity certification system enables landlords to assess, improve, benchmark, and advertise their properties.

WireScore has already certified buildings that are homes to over 7 million people. Moreover, WireScore has also developed SmartScore their smart building certification. These certifications aim to facilitate the way landlords understand, improve and communicate their user functionality and the technological foundations of their properties. 

With a carefully chosen niche within the real estate industry, WireScore is grounding itself as the leading startup for building technological certifications. 

Bridgit

Bridgit is the workforce intelligence real estate startup for the construction industry. Therefore, Bridgit is on the mission to help companies within the construction industry maximize their profits by utilizing their workforce resources in a smart and intelligent manner. 

This real estate startup is essentially becoming the project and resource management tool for the construction sector. It allows you to plan your workforce strategically by leveraging historical project data to make informed staffing decisions. Then based on that it will provide you with forecasts on your project pipeline to help you put forward a winning team.

Additionally, Bridgit will help you understand which project roles are unfilled and how to prioritize allocations. You will also be able to see your workforce utilization rates by title, region, and any custom parameters that you set. 

Consecutively, the workforce Intelligence from Bridgit helps transform your workforce data into actionable insights to help you form data-driven strategic and tactical business decisions.

2nd Address

Finding a niche to succeed is an extremely difficult thing to pull off in business. However, no one arguably found a better niche in the real estate industry than 2nd Address. This is easily illustrated by the company’s vision to make business traveling simple.

Specifically, 2nd Address tackles this issue by providing well over 4.800 premium homes for any of its users in 7 major US markets. Also, they provide comfort and convenience which greatly improve the corporate travel experience. Additionally, they have a partner list full of giants like Google, Facebook, etc as further proof of credibility for their business model.

Badi

Badi, the next real estate startup on the list, is an AI-powered platform bringing innovation to the real estate world. Namely, they have built a trusted community where users can easily and securely book hotel rooms. Moreover, users can facilitate bookings as well as online payments.

Essentially, Badi connects people with shared spaces for rent. We expect this Spanish-based real estate startup, backed by $47 million dollars of funding so far, to continue developing massively in the near future.

ServiceTitan

Most great companies have an interesting story that led to their start. And indeed that’s the case with Service Titan. This real estate startup was founded by their founders’ dreams to help their fathers run their contracting businesses better and more efficiently.

Service Titan provides all-in-one software to contracting and field services companies. They create tools, training, and support for the field services trades at their core in order to support their customers and help them achieve their goals. 

As a result of all the previously mentioned, the company has reached massive growth. The company has received well over $1 billion dollars in total funding, has over 1000 employees, and is a leader in their field trusted by more than 5.000 companies.

NoBroker

NoBroker is a real estate startup that is on a mission to remove the middleman that so many businesses depend on. As the world’s largest no-brokerage site, as their name suggests, NoBroker is enabling its customers to buy, sell and rent their properties without paying brokerage fees. 

Based in India, this real estate startup has a huge market to conquer and we expect a lot of growth for them in the near future.

GetAgent

Unlike several other members on our list, this real estate startup is actually focused on improving one aspect of the real estate process. Specifically, this company focuses on the agents, more specifically on finding the best possible real estate agent for its customers in a transparent way.

Therefore, they have created an online platform where users can find the most suitable agents for their individual situations. Namely, GetAgent analyzes property data and allows its customers to compare agents’ performance. As a result, the user can choose the agent they want and trust. Furthermore, thanks to this model, GetAgent have sold more than 200.000 homes in the UK alone, making it a rising real estate startup star.

Flyhomes

Buying real estate isn’t an easy thing to do, it can easily get complicated and expensive. However, Flyhomes is the real estate startup that is changing that. This is best illustrated by their goal to completely simplify the buying process. Specifically, this real estate startup guides their customers throughout the entire buyer’s journey.

As an example, they bring a group of experts including an agent to help the customer with everything they need. Additionally, Flyhomes helps you buy a new place before you sell so you could move easier and faster without the unnecessary stress. Furthermore, the company uses its technological prowess to win the home their customers desire. 

Poplar Homes

Poplar Homes, also formerly known as One Rent, is a property management service that’s bringing innovation in their field. This real estate startup stands for fair and friendly rental experiences. To achieve this, Poplar Homes uses a simplified approach to make renting easy for tenants as well as landlords.

For this purpose, they have created an easy to use online platform with 24/7 customer service that frees its customers from property management busywork. Therefore,  the entire process is seamless and more profitable for all parties involved. Nowadays, Poplar Homes serves more than 10 markets and has at least 8.000 residents. 

Morty

Nowadays, it’s hard to find an affordable mortgage especially when there are so many options that only can confuse the customer even more. Thus, in 2015 Morty was founded with the goal of making this seamless. 

Morty is working on empowering homebuyers to confidently secure and finance their home purchases online. In a nutshell, they are an online mortgage broker that helps first-time homebuyers. Additionally, they created a platform where their users can compare, shop, and close any loans from any lenders online. 

This real estate startup has seen huge interest from its target customers and has consecutively managed to expand to 36 states in only a few years since their launch.

EasyKnock

EasyKnock is a real estate startup that facilitates the process of changing homeownership. They enable homeowners to sell without having to move out immediately. Thus, they achieved this process through their innovative sale-leaseback program. Essentially, the company buys the home from their customers and allows them to stay in as tenants which in return gives their customers time and money to settle their individual situations.

In a nutshell, this enables tenants to take their time to finalize the purchase of their new home without being overwhelmed by the stress and pressure of having to vacate and move to temporary residences. 

EasyKnock’s innovative business model is proving to be attractive to investors and customers as the company has seen unprecedented growth in customer acquisition as well as funding.

What all these real estate startups have in common

All these real estate startups that we have mentioned in our list are combining technology to disrupt and improve their industry. From rentals to securing mortgages, these startups are developing new business models and reinventing entire customer journeys. We are extremely excited to see how their progress inspires even more innovation within the real estate industry.