“There is a speed and pace that we had to adjust to. “There is a reason so many companies are started out there,” Tommy Sowers says. (Note: ExitEvent parent Capitol Broadcasting is also an investor.)Ī lot comes back to the time in San Francisco. A $5,000 Lowes gift card giveaway going on now has nearly 120,000 entries with three weeks to go. Strategic investors like Lowes are key to adding more buyers and sellers. Besides consumers, it’s starting to work with major acquirers of real estate, like asset managers Blackstone or Apollo who are drawn to an easy resource to close real estate deals in any U.S. Sowers says that GoldenKey sped up by five times after completing NFX. Louis (where Shayne Sowers resides), but now has developers in San Francisco, as a result of relationships built during NFX. GoldenKey continues to grow its headquarters team in Durham and a sales staff in St. NFX helped Sowers see the pitch as just another product to think about selling. The pitch was another focus of the accelerator. Here’s the startup’s pitch at the NFX Demo Day, which drew more than 200 Silicon Valley investors: Sowers says he’s saved consumers more than $800,000 in commissions so far, with its agents transacting more than $32 million via the site. “If you’re part-time, that might be perfect,” Sowers says. One Triangle Realtor made $10,000 from GoldenKey transactions last year. The rate of the split changes based on region of the country and factors like real estate laws (which requires Realtors in some states do more than others). GoldenKey collects the fees and splits them with a Realtor. Rather than let agents set their prices, GoldenKey has spent a lot of time testing various set prices so there’s no mystery in pricing. GoldenKey already had that resource in what CEO Tommy Sowers calls “the largest licensed, trained, insured and underutilized workforce in America.” But most are also constrained by supply-Uber and Lyft need to find and train local drivers. Most marketplaces grow by entering and penetrating one new city or region at a time. The name GoldenKey plays on the magic that seems to happen when consumers and agents use GoldenKey instead of the traditional real estate process.Ĭulturally, GoldenKey had to change the way it thought about growth. When sellers learned they could pay 3 percent in commission, buyers learned of the rebate check they’d get at the end of the transaction and agents learned of an easy way to pick up extra work, many said the service sounded too good to be true. They still wanted to save money and take advantage of the conveniences provided by SoloPro, but they wanted a trusted and vetted person to take them from list to sale or from contract to closing.

Turned out that a lot of consumers were scared and intimidated by that prospect. Rather than hire a Realtor and pay a 6 or 7 percent commission, it gave buyers and sellers the ability to handle some aspects of the process on their own and pay a la carte for the rest. SoloPro had focused on the independence associated with its offering.

2,000 are already part of the GoldenKey network.īut the time at NFX last summer wasn’t without big changes, including the company’s name and a pretty significant culture shift. state by any of 1.8 million licensed real estate agents. With mentorship and advice from NFX managing partners like Pete Flint, a Trulia co-founder and former CEO, and James Currier, who has founded, invested and advised numerous marketplace startups over the last 16 years, GoldenKey is now set up to handle transactions in any U.S. Investors included NFX and Lowes Companies, bringing the total raised past $3.4 million. Completion of the program aligned with a $1.75 million round of funding announced last week.

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