Fathom Holdings subsidiary IntelliAgent has acquired market data and technology platform LiveBy for $9 million, which consists of $3 million in cash and $6 million in Fathom Holdings common stock. The deal is expected to close sometime during the second quarter of 2021, according to an announcement on Thursday.
“With the acquisition of LiveBy, we believe we can accomplish four very important goals on our path to disrupt the real estate industry,” said Fathom Chairman and CEO Josh Harley said in the announcement. “Realtors are looking for better technology to help them stand out and compete, and we believe LiveBy can help them do just that in their local communities by enabling them to be seen as local market experts.”
Cory Scott
“At LiveBy, we love facilitating extraordinary relationships among buyers, sellers and agents through local discovery,” LiveBy CEO Cory Scott added. “By joining forces with Fathom, a company that shares our same values, we should be able to attract a growing number of agents and empower them with a wide array of hyper-local tools to help them be more successful.
Founded in 2015, LiveBy uses hyperlocal market data to help agents bolster website engagement and nurture leads through personalized, key insights for buyers and sellers. LiveBy’s database includes information for neighborhood boundaries, cities, subdivisions, school districts, and zip codes in all 50 states, Canada, Mexico, the Bahamas and the Cayman Islands.
Much like Fathom’s February acquisition of marketing and technology platform Naberly Solutions, Harley said LiveBy will be an integral part of the brokerage’s national real estate portal.”We believe we can develop a successful real estate portal that can effectively compete with the largest sites by focusing on building a hyperlocal content-rich site that search engines will begin to recognize as the authority in local markets,” he said.
In a previous Inman article, Harley said the national portal will be “independent of Fathom Realty” as IntelliAgent is owned by Fathom Holdings, Fathom Realty’s parent company. The CEO said this will allow Fathom and non-Fathom agents to use the IntelliAgent platform and portal, and be assured their data isn’t being accessed by IntelliAgent.
“We do not have the desire to compete by outspending our competition, nor do we need to generate leads for hundreds of thousands of agents in order to make this initiative highly successful,” Harley explained. “If I learned anything from my time in the Marine Corps, it’s that a small elite force can outsmart and overpower larger forces, and we believe we can do the same thing at Fathom.”
In addition to launching the national portal, Harley said Fathom’s technology acquisitions are an important part of their path to profitability.
“Lastly, as I have been stating since our IPO, Fathom’s technology is what allows us to achieve a faster path to profitability while charging a small fraction of what our competitors charge, and there are thousands of brokerages that need what we’re building,” he said.
Since Fathom Holding’s July IPO, the company’s annual revenue has climbed 59 percent year over year to $176.8 million as a result of double-digit growth in transactions, average revenue per transaction, and agent count. Fathom’s latest earnings call revealed the company is inching closer to profitability with its generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) net loss closing from $4.1 million in 2019 to $1.3 million in 2020.