Welcome to the first lightning episode of Rentbits Rental Talk, where we give recent rental industry updates in under 3 minutes. This has been an incredible last few weeks for rental related startups. There have been numerous large acquisitions and the announcement of new real estate fund.
Let's get right into it:
In late October, Expedia announced that they acquired Pillow and ApartmentJet to add additional tools for landlords and property managers looking to offer short-term rentals within their homes or apartments. Pillow raised $16.2MM over the last four years and launched one of the first platforms for apartment owners and communities to offer their residents tools that help them rent out their units and receive a share of the revenue. ApartmentJet, raised $1.2MM and offers a similar service.
Realpage recently announced they acquired Rentalytics for approximately $57MM in cash. Rentalytics offers data analytics to the multifamily industry and raised $16M over 2 rounds.
Homebot, which raised over $4MM and was recently on our podcast, won the prestigious Realogy tech summit award. They beat out 9 other innovative real estate related startups.
And finally, John Helm, the founder of AllApartments and Mynewplace, both of which were sold, launched an early staged venture capital firm specifically for real estate related technology startups called Real Estate Technology Ventures. AKA RET Ventures. Their first fund raised $108MM from some of the largest REITs and Apartment owners in the world. In all, these limited partners manage over 40M rental units. Their first investment occured this week where they led a $5M series A round for SmartRent, a home automation platform for apartments.
