Luxury real estate firm The Agency has acquired New York brokerage Triplemint, giving it a foothold in the Manhattan market as part of an ambitious expansion plan.
The Agency, based in Los Angeles, also completed its first outside fundraising effort, amassing $35 million to spend on growth, to give it a valuation of about $350 million. For some, the brokerage is best known for its regular appearances on Bravo’s “Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles” and “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.”
Triplemint, founded in 2013 by a pair of recent Yale University graduates, has sought to distinguish itself with its own search and client-management platform and the data it generates. That’s what appealed to The Agency, which had tried to build its own engineering team and found what it was looking for after executives from both firms spoke on a virtual panel early last year.
Triplemint’s technology is central to The Agency’s growth plans, which include opening offices in Australia and the Middle East and reaching beyond traditional brokerage services to include vacation-home rentals and high-end hospitality, Chief Executive Officer Mauricio Umansky said.
“We have a lot of branding and a lot of reach, but one of the things that we found very interesting about Triplemint was the tech-enabled platform that they had built,” said Umansky, whose firm already operates in North America, the Caribbean and Europe. “We’re really excited about expanding the platform globally.”
Having a Manhattan presence was key to becoming a global company, according to Umansky. The firm had already been planning to push into New York, but being able to take on Triplemint’s established brokerage and 250 agents in the region was the “icing on the cake” for the acquisition, said Rainy Hake Austin, The Agency’s president.
Going public may be an eventual option for the combined company, which will take The Agency name and open an East Coast corporate headquarters later this year, according to Umansky. His co-founder, Billy Rose, is a former Hollywood talent agent, and his wife, Kyle Richards, is a long-time regular on “Real Housewives.”
The rise of Zillow and public access to multiple listing services has cut into brokers’ century-old advantage with clients, said Triplemint co-founder David Walker, now chief strategy officer at The Agency. Triplemint says its own search engine is more useful for both clients and agents, and data the firm collects provides real-time insight into the market, he said.
That will give The Agency a major edge over competitors who rely on data that’s often weeks or months old, according to Umansky. For clients, it will amount to “better service, more traffic, more and further transparency,” he said.
A purchase price for Triplemint wasn’t disclosed. Walker, co-founder Philip Lang and other Triplemint shareholders each received equity stakes in The Agency, and employees will able to participate in a stock option program. The deal was completed without any bankers or outside financial advisers, said Lang, now The Agency’s chief business officer.
Investors in the fundraising round include family offices and venture capital firms, though Umansky declined to identify them. Lang said all the investors are based in the U.S.