One of the great success stories in real estate technology is MoxiWorks. This Seattle based company started out as the in-house technology group at Windermere, one of the premier brokers and franchisers operating on the west coast. Seven years ago, Windermere Real Estate President OB Jacobi spun out their technology group into a stand alone corporation. The MoxiWorks CRM product and listing presentation products emerged across the industry as a top 5 pick among enterprise brokers, resulting in securing two of America’s top 10 firms as customers, namely Long and Foster and Howard Hanna. These companies not only license MoxiWorks for their agents, they also invested in the company to assure effective support of the application in their business. Adding these customers and securing their financial support enabled MoxiWorks to go though years of triple digit growth.
A few years ago, MoxiWorks developed MoxiCloud. Think of MoxiCloud like an App Store for real estate technology. There are three types of data in MoxiCloud which include MLS records, firm records (agent, office, and broker identities), and customer records. As the broker wishes, they can integrate their data into other applications outside of MoxiWorks using MoxiCloud. For example, if a brokerage wants to add a virtual tour solution to their technology offering, that vendor connects to MoxiCloud to consume the data and the virtual tour is available to the agent. It’s plug and play. MoxiWorks is also the Cloud provider to the Leading Real Estate Companies of the World, the largest global network of independent brokerages.
In securing growth capital from Vector Capital, MoxiWorks will now be able to focus on three areas of ongoing growth – improved agent and broker websites, acquisitions, and expansion. This is the first and only investment by Vector Capital in real estate technology.
Broker and Agent Website Enhancement
MoxiWorks developed a solid broker and agent website solution which they will now be able to improve to be among the best in the industry. MoxiWorks won many of the broker vendor selections that we did last year for large firms. When they did not win, the key objection was website design. In many cases, brokers would select MoxiWorks for their back-office intranet, CRM, and listing presentation tool, and use another vendor for broker and agent websites.
Acquisitions
Have you noticed how Salesforce acquires companies that are popular with their customers? When you have a platform like MoxiCloud, you have optics into the choices brokers make on end point solutions. An example of this is Inside Real Estate purchasing Circlepix for marketing and BrokerSumo for commission accounting. Inside Real Estate, like MoxiWorks has the backing of private equity capital. We look forward to seeing the acquisitions that will be forthcoming from MoxiWorks. Our bet is that Buyside may be one of the first. We’ll see.
Growth
There are two ways to grow a technology company. MoxiWorks has been pursuing organic growth for the most part. They sell their product then hire people and expand resources to support the sales. That is a good strategy unless your sales team gets too far ahead of the internal expansion of resources to deliver on the sales. It takes project managers, trainers, programmers, and a host of staff to deploy enterprise platforms. Small companies can only do one or two at a time. Large companies can deploy dozens of new customers. With this additional capital, MoxiWorks will be able to expand their speed to market in supporting their sales team and new customers.
Consolidation
RE Technology has dozens of broker website platforms in its directory. Some of them, like Real Estate Webmasters, Inside Real Estate, Delta Media, Gabriels, Enterprise Network, etc., are pretty big and growing alongside MoxiWorks. I believe that there will be significant consolidation among these firms, and that the companies with the best growth capitalization will win. Having an investment capital resource for long term private equity is certainly a solid strategy to take advantage of consolidation.
