There has been a lot of consolidation in the CRM space over the past few years. The largest was when Inside Real Estate purchased Boomtown last year.  A few companies have emerged as category killers. Just about every franchise has a platform solution that they provide to all agents which includes CRM – Inside Real Estate, MoxiWorks, Delta Media, Tribus, Reliance, Constellation, LoneWolf Foundation, etc. But there are 85,000 brokers in America… Some unknown number of teams and agents buy their own CRM, too; there are probably 100 CRM options in real estate. 

One of the leading companies that came up through the agent and team ranks is Lofty. Like Nautilent for Tribus, BoldTrail for Inside Real Estate, and Foundation for LoneWolf, Lofty is the new brand name for Chime. The company is owned by Joe Chen who is renowned for buying and building large software companies. His target is USD $Billion or more in valuation for Lofty. Keep an eye on them. 

Lofty Acquires Firefly CRM and Moves Clients

In a press release earlier this month, Lofty announced the purchase of Firefly CRM. Firefly was a pretty cool product developed by real estate professionals that must not have achieved the scale that the founders expected. After a good run, Chen acquired the company and they are moving the customer base over to the Lofty platform – that is really good news for the Firefly customers. Migrating data from one CRM to another is painful. The Firefly customers will receive the migration services, training, and support and will keep the same pricing on Lofty. Overall, this is a pretty great outcome; versus shutting down the service and hanging those customers out to dry. 

I expect that Lofty picked up some skilled staff, too. Hiring real estate technology people is hard and accu-hires (buy a company to hire their employees) is popular for fast growing firms. Remember when Trulia purchased Market Leader? They wanted the staff as much as the product. Market Leader was traded to Constellation in 2015, the same year that Trulia was purchased by Zillow. WAV Groups’ M&A team is busy on a number of brokerage and technology mergers today. Seems like consolidation will continue forever. It’s a great strategy to grow revenue and profit. 

Congrats to Joe and the team at Lofty and Firefly. 

Lofty is doing some additional innovative things. I recently was invited to purchase a share of an investment property which is being sold in $50 units. The ownership is held on the blockchain – so we will see how that goes. 

Our industry spent a few years talking about blockchain

WAV Group’s Nelson Diaz continues to work on some great projects – but not much has gained traction in real estate. Diaz does more projects for companies outside the industry. We are still big on blockchain and crypto-currency. It’s just developing more slowly than the experts expected. If you need help on a blockchain project or would like to launch an NFT – we can hook you up easily and do the process securely.