Company operates as a franchisee
MooveGuru is a novelty in the real estate technology world: a proptech franchise.
Based in Georgia, it provides white label technologies designed to help real estate agents, brokers and mortgage lenders do their jobs and create a better experience for their clients.
“Franchising is really a very effective way of distribution,” said Kathleen Kuhn (pictured), president of the Georgia-based company. “You’re able to get like-minded, highly motivated, highly qualified individuals that are going to go out and promote your brand.”
CEO and founder Scott Oakley launched MooveGuru in 2016, and the company now employs about 36 people. It has raised approximately $8 million in venture capital to date, Kuhn said.
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MooveGuru’s initial product in 2016 was Mover Engage, a technology tool that can be branded by a real estate agent or lender and is designed to provide “timely discounts” to consumers to reduce costs and hassles they face with moving. The company subsequently came out with Mover Connect, a product that can also be branded to lenders and real estate professionals. It is designed to help connect utilities for people in the process of moving to a new home.
“On behalf of John Smith, your lender, we can connect your utilities,” Kuhn explained. “We can save the consumer time and money in that process.”
Broader focus
YourHomeHub came next, in the spring of 2021, in the months after MooveGuru’s acquisition of HomeKeepr, a home pro referral platform that added, in part, 300,000 home professionals plus 230,000 real estate agents and their clients to MooveGuru’s database. That company put together a directory of service professionals they linked out to their customers, making it easy for real estate professionals to recommend homecare experts.
This acquisition formed the basis of YourHomeHub, which combines MooveGuru’s existing platform concepts with some of the HomeKeepr basics.
“A real estate professional or a lender would invite their client to the platform. It would be given to the client .. [or] homeowner for free,” Kuhn said, “When the homeowner logs in [there] is a full homeowner dashboard that allows them to manage everything [home-related] from the financial to the physical aspects of the room.” The site the customer logs into is also prepopulated with data about the customer’s home.
Tech elements, industry need
YourHomeHub is aggregated with “a significant number of data providers” in a way that gathers the information into a single hub, allowing consumers to see what is going on in their neighborhood from a real estate perspective, Kuhn explained.
“They have access to over 300,000 home professionals within the network and every one of those professionals are referred by real estate professionals who are global experts,” she added. “We constantly refresh the database or the dashboard with twice-weekly content about home ownership.”
There’s also a predictive analytics tool that monitors the contacts in participating real estate agents’ or lenders’ databases, looking for triggers that would score those contacts as likely movers. Once there is a hit, MooveGuru takes action.
“We alert the lender or real estate professional that … there’s somebody in their contacts that is considered statistically a likely mover,” Kuhn said.
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The mortgage industry has use for such a tool because, simply put, it gives agents and lenders a competitive edge, Kuhn argued.
“It helps link their relationship in between transactions,” she said. “Lenders have the same challenge that a real estate agent has and that is they have great relationships with consumers completely thrilled with their experience and then they don’t need another mortgage for the next seven to 11 years."
YourHomeHub and MooveGuru helps bridge that gap by offering tools that lenders can use secondarily, Kuhn said.
“Lenders can give this to their client as part of the transaction and put the real estate agent into the platform, so the [agent] gets the promotion on an ongoing basis,” Kuhn said. “It can be a very powerful marketing tool for [lenders]to further their relationships with real estate professionals.”
Franchise model
MooveGuru currently has franchisees in 28 states representing its brand in local markets. Kuhn calls their work a combined “grassroots effort” to promote the brand.
“We’ve been able to recruit some incredibly influential franchisees that … are out launching their sales teams,” Kuhn said.S
However, MooveGuru’s franchise system works differently than the traditional model, where interested parties buy the franchise and pay the franchisor a piece of their income.
“We actually pay the franchisees revenue, so they go out and sell subscriptions and we pay them a percentage of those subsequent subscriptions,” Kuhn said.
Real estate agents or lenders can use the platform for free, or they can give it to their clients for free. If they’d like the upgraded version, which provides exclusivity, they would sign a contract for which no other lender or agent could be associated with that contract.
