South African proptech startup expands to Australia

Founded by Gil Sperling and Daniel Levy, Flow is a South African proptech startup that automates rental and seller listings on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn and drives pre-assessed leads straight to the phones of the listing estate agents and landlords.

Having achieved consistent 30% MoM growth since launch and secured $2.4m backing from various venture capital funds during 2018 and 2019, Flow is now used by 4 500 South African estate agents and has reached over 9 million South African buyers and tenants.

African proptechs are building scalable solutions with application beyond the continent more frequently than ever before, with strong reception from global markets seeing the viability of home-grown African businesses

The company’s proprietary data shows a 10x increase in the use of social media to sell property over the last 12 months coinciding with an uptick in buyers and renters searching for and finding property on digital channels. Having previously lagged, in part due to an archaic property industry, more and more startups are bridging the gap between analogue processes and the hyper-connected world that we are used to. 

Boasting 90,000 agents and a housing market value of $9 trillion, Australia offers a latent opportunity for Flow to change the way that people find places to live and work.

“Surprisingly for such a progressive economy, Australia’s real estate industry suffers from similar dynamics and transformations that are happening to real estate markets like South Africa,” said Gil Sperling, Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Flow. “By rolling out Flow in Australia we’re grabbing the collar of an industry dragging its heels to propel it into the 21st century. Such a high percentage of people have one form of social media or another, so real estate agents and property developers really can’t afford to miss out on reaching that audience directly in an efficient way.” 

As the company begins to increase its global footprint, integrations with Australian real estate CRMs AgentBox and Box+Dice will provide Flow access to 6,300 Australian estate agent offices, along with a partnership with real estate management proptech MRI Software.

Daniel Levy, Co-Founder and Co-CEO added, “We put in a huge amount of research before committing to the expansion and we’ve had super positive results during the testing period. Our tech was always designed for savvy agents and developers who are experts in their chosen areas, no matter whether that’s in Africa or elsewhere around the world. We’re launching in Australia with a distribution partner and actively looking at other markets where we can follow suit with a similar approach.”

Read more: SA proptech Flow set to close new funding round at end of month, says CEO