The platform offers home buyers the ability to search for a property, take out a mortgage and organise all legal matters online – connecting each step into a ‘single customer experience’.
The Series A funding round has been backed by some well-known investment giants including Lord Jacob Rothschild and family, Joshua Alliance (son of Lord David Alliance), Reuben Brothers Capital, Winslow Capital founder Clark Winslow, DLA Piper former Global co-CEO and OneDome chairman Sir Nigel Knowles.
While it describes itself as a Rightmove challenger, OneDome said it differentiates itself from this and other property websites such as Zoopla by focussing not just on the property hunting experience, but the whole process – offering consumers an ‘Amazon like’ end-to-end process.
It said 48% of the estate agency market provided listings to OneDome operated websites – onedome.com and nethouseprices.com – generating over 2.5m sessions per month.
It the last four months, driven by the Covid-19 pandemic, it has seen customer engagement increase by 665% meaning more than 170,000 property enquiries were now being generated by OneDome per month.
The current funding round, which takes OneDome’s total funding to £13m, will help develop and optimise the OneDome platform across several areas.
Four week transactions
This will enable the firm to fund further product development to enable faster transactions, with the goal of fulfilling customers’ transactions within four weeks.
The capital will also be used to expand marketing outreach, increase the number of properties listed for sale and rent on the platform and to invest in a team of personal moving assistants to help each customer through the process.
The series A funding round comes following OneDome’s acquisition of Nethouseprices.comin the second half of 2019, and it became a listing partner of Facebook Marketplace at the end of 2019.
Babek Ismayil, founder, OneDome said: “We are delighted to have closed our series A funding round with support from such prominent names in the investment world.
“The home buying process has had little impact from technology and innovation, which has transformed our experiences in other areas of our life from shopping to food ordering.
“While home buying is naturally a more complex process, it can still be dramatically improved and optimised. Our e-Homebuying platform will make homebuying a simpler and more streamlined process for all parties involved, saving money and time.”
