Why We Invested – Ownly

NAventures is happy to announce our recent investment in Ownly, a white label e-commerce platform and lead generation tool for new residential home builders. 

Context  

In recent years, highly scalable property technology companies (aka Proptechs) like Ownly have begun to disrupt industries that have traditionally shied away from innovation and underinvested in the user experience. Accelerated by Covid-19, purchasers of new homes are now demanding a modern, transparent, and detailed way to shop for a new home online. They want the ability to customize, price, visualize and purchase and they want to do it all in one place. 

On the home builder side, larger developers in Canada and the US spend millions of dollars each year to market their residential projects in order to gain access to highly vetted and qualified purchaser leads. Working with intermediaries like real-estate brokers and marketing firms, thousands of hours are spent cold calling, emailing and organizing customer data to arrive at a very small number of vetted purchasers. In order to streamline this process, many builders have made significant investments in CRMs like SalesForce to appropriately track and manage customer relationships and have spent millions on marketing efforts to drive purchaser traffic.  

The confluence of the purchaser’s desire for transparency, an excellent user experience and ability to transact online, combined with lead generation inefficiencies and high sales costs for residential builders have created a tremendous opportunity for tools that efficiently bring together high intent purchasers and home builders. 

At NAventures, we have been closely examining the Proptech space in Canada and the US to identify opportunities to expand NBC’s reach both in terms of new client acquisition, cross-sell opportunities, and data acquisition. Residential home purchasing is particularly interesting as it regularly requires residential mortgage financing, one of the bank’s most profitable products. The financial institution that owns the mortgage will also frequently be the client’s primary bank, opening the door to cross-sales of other financial products. The new home buyer client profile is an attractive segment for NBC. Over 30% of home buyers are first time buyers under 35 years of age.  Many are also new arrivals to Canada. Immigrants typically account for a larger share of buyers relative to their share of the total population. We believe that the emergence of innovative business models like direct-to-consumer new home purchasing will increase the number of eligible homeowners in the near future and we want to position NBC to take advantage of this expanded pie. NAventures has already made investments in companies in the digital mortgage space and wishes to continue to invest in companies that provide distribution channel opportunities for NBC products and access to quality clients & their data.   

Why Ownly?  

Ownly’s SaaS offering is one of only a few solutions that allows prospective purchasers to build, compare, price, and purchase their new home entirely online. As the purchaser moves through the Ownly buying experience, embedded and white labelled into the builders’ website, the purchaser will be incentivized through rewards and discounts to provide access to personal & financial information through integrations with providers like Equifax & Interac in a FINTRAC compliant manner, a first of its kind in new home purchasing. Ownly’s integrations provide the purchaser with the ability to receive a mortgage pre-approval through third party partners like banks and digital mortgage brokerages.  

Ownly’s builder clients gain access to unprecedented data on prospective purchaser leads and their buying preferences. The ability for a builder or any contracted third party to identify, evaluate and integrate highly qualified leads into their CRMs is extremely valuable. Historically, brokers and builders would have to cold call and contact hundreds of unqualified leads for a project before arriving at a group of identified individuals that are genuinely interested and can afford to purchase a home. Through Ownly, these highly qualified purchaser leads can now be generated directly from the builder’s project website. Furthermore, Ownly’s build and price functionality provides invaluable insights into the types of models and finishings prospective purchasers actually want in their home, streamlining cost analyses and inventory management for builders. 

We look forward to discussing integration partnerships with Ownly as NBC continues to improve its products and services to provide the best experience for its clients and partners. 

We would like to congratulate CEO Jason Hardy and CTO Ray Yip for their innovative solution and impressive traction with Canadian and US home builders. 

The NAventures Team