When Josh Flagg, Andrew Shanfeld and Griffin O’Brien founded Estate Media, they were looking to capitalize on a peculiar phenomenon.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, the U.S. was hungry for real estate content. Cooped up indoors with time to work on a home improvement project and ponder working from home indefinitely in a larger estate, traffic on housing search portals spiked, celebrity home tours went viral and interest rates were significantly lower versus today.
Real estate agents tried to capitalize on the moment, posting video walk-throughs of their local areas’ high rises, modest bungalows and good deals.
“Their ability to meet people in person essentially evaporated,” O’Brien said. “We very much saw that Instagram and social media was essentially the new park bench for a real estate agent.”
Together, the trio created Estate Media, a new digital media company nestled in the rolling Hollywood Hills that focused on all things related to the real estate sector, from advice for new entrants to market insights. The company rang in its second year with a $1 million seed funding round and more than $6 million in revenue in early November.
The news, first reported by TheWrap, puts total funding for the real estate media platform at $2.65 million backed by well-known names including Tinder Co-founder Justin Mateen and real estate broker and main cast member on “Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles” Tracy Tutor.
Though there is no shortage of YouTube channels, industry publications and television shows covering every facet of real estate, Estate Media is presented as a middle ground between the jargon-laden trade outlets and the plethora of entertainment-minded property content on the internet.
The company is social media-first, operating largely on platforms like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. The newsletter arm also reaches real estate agents and property enthusiasts alike. The company’s content goes out to more than one-third of all realtors in the U.S.
“In business-to-business media, you can create a really incredible diversified business because you’re essentially building distribution and an advertising business,” O’Brien said. “And then once you have that built-in community, there are many ways to build products and services and monetize that audience outside of ads.”
Estate Media attempts to learn from the mistakes of media companies that came before them. Media careerist O’Brien watched the first generation of venture-funded, digital-first media companies – think Buzzfeed Inc. and Vice Media – struggle to turn a profit and find unique business models to back up their valuations. Meanwhile, Flagg, a real estate agent and reality television star on “Million Dollar Listing,” saw the decline of traditional cable television over the course of the show’s 15 years. In an era of fascination for real estate, opportunities for real estate agents to platform themselves or ride the wave were few.
“I think the advertising options when it came to residential (real estate) were the old school publications,” O’Brien said. “And then you had obviously the traditional reality real estate shows, which in my opinion were very derivative. They followed the same formats.”
link