I’m excited to share our latest startup investment through my VC Fund at Blue Field Capital. Introducing Agently, the first real estate productivity platform designed to help brokerages develop professional sales teams and drive performance.
Although our VC portfolio is considerably diversified within the office, multi-family, hotel, construction, and property management sectors, we have yet to explore solutions marketed for real estate teams and brokerages. Our investment in Agently is a step in this direction.
Agently is a compelling investment as it is not just a point solution, but a platform solution. The brokerage industry today uses a multitude of expensive stand-alone software solutions including LMS (Learning Management Systems), Intranet portals, Comms platforms, and Coaching Solutions. As brokerage commissions continue to compress over time, we believe that stand-alone solutions will struggle to demonstrate an ROI and that the industry needs to mature with a platform offering that can replace all of those services at a fraction of the cost. Ultimately, we hope that Agently becomes a key part of the workflow for real estate brokerage teams much like Yardi and AppFolio have become part of the workflow for Property Managers in the multifamily sector.
Solution to a major industry pain point
A common concern echoed across conversations we had with senior-level real estate brokers is the high churn rate among their agents. The record-high number of new agents who entered the industry in 2021 and 2022 coupled with a now cooling market, quite predictably led to massive agent attrition.
It’s also common knowledge in the real estate field that nearly 90% of agents fail within their first five years. Recent labor statistics say that more than 40,000 real estate businesses closed within their first two years. One factor causing this is the glut of unprepared and underdeveloped agents entering the field.
This underscores how agent retention and upskilling are prevalent pain points. Agently is positioned to address this problem and contribute to the industry’s transformation into a professionals’ market.
The primary offering is a customizable LRM (Learning Relationship Management) tool. The platform is designed to help brokers manage their agent pool, implement training programs, and track agent performance. The beauty of Agently’s custom-branded productivity app is that it makes the process personalized and manageable. It’s essentially a one-stop shop for brokers to effectively communicate, train, and monitor their teams.
We felt that other platforms in the market are either LMS-centered but positioned for non-sales related niches; or are indeed real-estate specific but CRM-heavy and don’t adequately address coaching solutions.
Leverages AI & tech to optimize agent-level processes
We kept a tab on Agently for several years before investing. Throughout this time, we saw that the team was amongst the first to implement AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) throughout their offerings including a CRM, social media marketing and ads manager, and listing-builder all in one place.
Strong team with domain experience
I’ve known Max Grebenuk, Agently’s Co-Founder and CEO for over a decade as we met in University. He was involved in building an EdTech startup that reached $3M in ARR. Before that, Max worked in sales within the Investment banking industry. This combination of EdTech and sales expertise inspired his drive to innovate within the sales productivity space.
Jaime Resendiz, also a Co-Founder, runs a team of over 200 real estate agents. Agently was built on the foundation of Jaime’s deep expertise in real estate. In fact, his team served as the platform’s test group, where it demonstrated an 83% increase in sales productivity.
Completing their founding team is Dima Serkin. Dima is a truly standout engineer, with prior experience as a senior cloud architect at Intel, nVidia, and multiple startups in Silicon Valley.
Large TAM with big potential to scale
Agently has a sizeable target market within the US alone: approximately 1.4 million real estate agents across an estimated 108K brokerages and 50K real estate teams. This adds up to a Serviceable Addressable Market in the US measured in the billions.
The team can quickly scale by partnering with brokerages. They recently won their first anchor brokerage customer with 4,000 agents. This customer signed on because they believe in Agently’s capacity to help them improve agent engagement, automate agent coaching and accountability, and drive agent retention.
Agently also has the vision of scaling across all kinds of industries. Though the platform is, at present, primarily marketed for brokers and individual agents, its customizability allows for dynamic application for virtually any kind of group implementing a training program. The company’s future growth strategy involves expanding into other verticals including non-RE remote sales teams and online coaching programs.
Promising early traction and potential
In just under a year of operations, Agently’s solutions have served over 10,000 real estate professionals working in key brokerages including eXp Realty, RE/MAX, Century 21 Real Estate, Compass, and Keller Williams.
Real estate powerhouses like NAR, Inman, and The Close have also recognized the tech behind the platform.
Recent critical developments in the Realtor space could soon cause a total overhaul in how agents operate across the entire industry. With Agently being the only purpose-built LMS for real estate, it’s poised to become an ever more relevant and beneficial platform for brokerages and Realtors within the foreseeable future.
I’m looking forward to witnessing how Agently will contribute to the elevation of the real estate profession and am excited to be an early investor.