HomeSpotter buys Spacio, adds office in Vancouver

HomeSpotter, a Minneapolis-based provider of mobile apps and data for real estate agents, said this week it acquired Vancouver-based Spacio, a developer of a mobile platform that agents use for open houses and for other marketing of a house.

Terms were not disclosed.

With the deal, HomeSpotter doubles its employee base from 15 to 30 and picks up an office in Vancouver.

Aaron Kardell, founder and chief executive of HomeSpotter, said the company for several years has considered adding open house-tracking features to its products. In a statement, he said, "The combination of the founding team at Spacio, their proven track record of delivering a best-in-class solution, and resoundingly supportive customer feedback — there's such strong alignment that it makes sense to bring our businesses together."

Melissa Kwan, co-founder of Spacio, said the company's platform is now well-designed for agents to use during an open house and afterward, to follow up with prospective buyers who visited. But she said, "We needed to give agents a way to market their listings before their open houses; this wasn't something we had the expertise to build on our own."

HomeSpotter's products include a digital advertising app called Boost. Kwan said that by integrating Boost with Spacio's products, "We can finally deliver the complete solution to agents that allows them to do all three: advertise their open houses before, capture leads during, and automatically follow up after, all within a single platform."

The two companies' products are used by more than 450,000 real estate agents and 250 brokerage firms in the U.S. and Canada.