Dash to DASH: Real estate platform makes finding new builds less of a headache
By Riley Kaminer
It’s literally Miami, bro. We want something clean, fresh – new. And that extends especially to our homes.
New construction abounds in the Magic City. But for people looking to find their perfect, pristine new build, the house hunt can be more difficult than you’d expect.
And more difficult than it should be, asserts Len Dugow [pictured above]. “There are too many silos that disconnect developers from brokerage firms and agents,” he told Refresh Miami. “It is very challenging for them to access up-to-date information and share it with their prospects and clients.”
That is why Dugow, who for 30 years has run a Miami-based branding and marketing advertising agency focused on luxury hospitality brands and residences, decided to build DASH. The 10-person startup has developed what it calls the most comprehensive database of new developments.
The platform, which has just launched in Miami as its first market, enables licensed real estate agents to access verified and up-to-date marketing materials, data, and insights in a single platform. It enables real estate agents to send perfectly formatted marketing materials (photos, renderings, floorplans, brochures, graphics) to their clients with their own branding.
“We have over 150 different filters for agents to quickly fine tune and figure out what their prospects are looking for,” said Dugow.
This level of information – all of which is vetted by the developers – is not available on other platforms or the MLS. For that reason, DASH asserts that their platform gives subscribers a competitive advantage by dramatically reducing research and discovery time, allowing them to make more sales more quickly.
Dugow and team undertook around 300 user research interviews as they were developing the platform. “DASH is the culmination of all those conversations,” Dugow noted. This user research paid off, with 92 agents and 58 developers signing up in the first 48 hours the platform was live.
DASH has two SaaS revenue streams. The first and priority stream is from agents, who pay either $39 or $79 per month for access to the platform, depending on how many features they are looking for. Developers pay a one-time fee of $1,000 to get onboarded onto the platform and then $750 per month for unlimited edits to their listings.
According to Dugow, DASH is about to close a $1 million angel round, with plans to raise a Series A within the next nine months. The platform will launch in New York by November and LA by January.
So why start in Miami? “I’ve been witness over the last 10 years to the jaw-dropping growth,” said Dugow. “It’s amazing to see what it has become. Florida is such a white-hot attraction for so many people from so many places that it immediately warranted the merit to be our focus.”
“DASH will be a hugely important tool to all the major stakeholders and with the simple objective of transparency. We bring transparency to a process that simply does not exist today. We are making the process so much smoother and less annoying.”
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