£3m boost for start-up helping traditional agents challenge onliners

PropTech start-up OneDome - which describes its products as allowing traditional estate agents to challenge Purplebricks and other online rivals - has secured a huge £3m funding boost from ultra high net worth investors.

OneDome recently released three products on to the market. They combine to form a digital toolkit consisting of services including online bookings of viewings and valuations, handling online offers and a secure communication platform for document exchange.

Founded by Babek Ismayil, a former distressed debt trader from JP Morgan, and launched officially only a year ago, OneDome aims to transform how consumers and property professionals interact.

In a statement announcing the new investment, the company says: “OneDome believes that consumer experience with the property market is extremely fragmented and unnecessarily stressful, with multiple friction points: from the point where a home mover considers where to live to moving day and beyond. This also results in a significant burden on property professionals and negatively affects their margins.”

OneDome says its objective is to digitise a number of different areas of the sales and moving processes - estate agency, legal services and financial services as well as building technology to help home movers search for and discover properties - and to achieve this the company has grown to employ almost 40 peopleafter little more than a year.

OneDome is perhaps best known amongst agents for its Locality Reality tool which scores every postcode in England based on seven criteria regarded as key to buyers when they look for or compare property locations. Locality Reality has generated nearly half a million visits since its soft launch in launch December 2016.