Lots of interesting tidbits from this article by Andrea Brambila at Inman News.
Zillow vs RPR: Which got more initial funding?
“Turns out Zillow got a lot more funding in its first years: $87 million in 2005-2007, but no additional funding before its initial public offering (IPO), according to CrunchBase.
Zillow went public July 20, 2011, raising $75.7 million. Its market cap was $962 million that day. Zillow had 10,710 Premier Agent subscribers then.
By contrast, RPR got $39.2 million in its first three years. The amount spent annually on the company has been rising nearly every year and is projected to keep doing so at least through 2019.”
Very interesting perspective. The total amount of funding RPR has received between 2009 and 2016 is over $144M.
I’d like to see a comparison of adoption. Meaning total number of active “Premier Agents” vs total number of “RPR Agents”. After a quick look online I didn’t find the actual number of Premier agents but, they have publicly stated that they are focusing on “super agents”. So Zillow cares less about total number of agents on their platform, only if they are buying a lot. RPR has stated previously that “there is a base of over 100,000 power users who use it frequently”, but everyone pays.
Of course N.A.R.’s mission is very different to Zillows. It will also be interesting to see how RPR’s pivot to AMP and Upstream vendor plays in to these revenue numbers going forward.
and there’s this…
“Of note: In June, Zillow agreed to pay its main competitor, realtor.com operator Move Inc., $130 million in a settlement to resolve all legal claims between them — an amount bigger than all of Zillow’s pre-IPO funding.”
Think about that awhile. Zillow settled a lawsuit for more money that they raised to get started. That’s pretty remarkable.
And finally,
“Zillow was to pay all the funds in full just two weeks after the settlement, on June 20. Neither Zillow nor Move would tell Inman whether the funds had been paid, saying the information would be disclosed in future earnings reports from their parent companies, Zillow Group and News Corp.”
Two weeks. Ouch!
