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New Camden (NJ) Based Real Estate App Brings In Investors

Posted on Oct 10 in Philly Newsby PrintText Resizer Text Resizer

 

Article From: www.Philly.com

By: Joseph N. DiStefano

Camden-based Smarter Agent says it has raised $6 million this year to boost sales of its smartphone app for real estate agents. Backers include Philadelphia investor Ira LubertReed Smith attorney (ex-Morgan Lewis chairman) Howard Schechter,Boku Inc. boss Mark Britto, and Alex Wasilov, the ex-Eastman Kodak executive, among others.

“We’ve raised $18.2 million since 2008,” Brad Blumberg, who founded the company with his brother Eric, told me. The brothers, who grew up in their father’s Margate real estate business, Blumberg Associates, say their firm provides for-sale home data to thousands of agents and their customers at real estate giants Century 21, Sotheby’s Realty, ERA, and such regionals as RE/MAX in New Jersey andBaird & Warner in Chicago.

“We went live in October with RE/MAX Mobile - 170 offices, 2,800 associates. It’s our version of the Smarter Agent app,” Amanda Brown, regional director from RE/MAX of New Jersey, told me. “The agents have embraced it. Everyone was already comfortable with the Web. But this allows the agents to get all that information in the palm of their hands instantly.

“It’s not cheap,” she added. “But we’ve been able to work out a deal through the tech piece of our advertising budget.”

The Blumbergs started messing with mobile Internet applications a decade ago. Ben Franklin Technology Partners financed early mobile-phone software demos that would hunt for users’ locations when that was still a novelty, not a privacy issue.

“We’d take a Palm 7 and put a GPS clip on it,” said Brad Blumberg. The result: “We now have five granted patents.” Blumberg is building not just an app, but also a system-neutral platform, “like salesforce.comfor mobile.”

Smarter Agent is boosting its current staff of 34 with recent hires such as Philip Charles-Pierre, a former Travelocity executive who moved here from New York, and Nick Smoot and Allen Hartwig, who moved here to work for Smarter Agent when it bought their firm, toorme.com, in Seattle.

Smoot moved his wife and kids here after she endorsed Philadelphia on a visit, Blumberg told me. Hartwig went to Fishtown and said, “This is it,” according to Blumberg. “He said, ‘If you’re not from the East, you want to live in a loft.’ He saw that movie Big, the loft with the basketball court, and he wanted that. And they love all the bars and restaurants. It’s what young kids like.”

Zikria Syed left Microsoft’s Malvern office eight years ago for his own business. Syed’s current company,NextDocs, makes regulatory-compliance software for drug companies. NextDocs employs 85, with offices in seven states and six countries (Japan will be next). Most staffers are based at NextDocs’ King of Prussia headquarters, down Route 202 from Microsoft’s 160-person Life Sciences Industry headquarters.

Syed may have left Microsoft, but there are no hard feelings: NextDocs shares Microsoft’s drug clients, who include Sanofi-Aventis, Johnson & Johnson, and Merck & Co. Inc., among others, says Michael Naimoli, managing director of Microsoft Life Sciences.

“It’s in the DNA of Microsoft to work through a partner ecosystem,” Naimoli told me. “We have, traditionally, not necessarily produced software that is specific for the life-sciences industry. Our primary focus, with respect to life science and health care, is to work with our partners,” vendors like NextDocs.

Proof of the partnership is the new 22,000-square-foot “Life Sciences Solutions Scalability Lab” that Microsoft opened with NextDocs after gutting a former Vanguard Group office downstairs from Microsoft’s Malvern office.

The lab, staffed by nine newly hired “technical architects,” includes rooms for visiting clients to test clinical-testing software (and hardware from Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and other vendors) before it is rolled out for thousands of staff members at individual companies.

Syed (Drexel grad, master’s degree in computer science, 1989) says five-year-old NextDocs has been profitable since 2007 and will top $10 million in sales this year, after two straight years of 60 percent sales growth.

Ready to sell the firm? No, says Syed: “There’s a very large market, and we think we can grow the company to a much larger scale over the next few years” by staying independent.

 

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