CARY – Growth continues to surge at technology-driven Fathom Realty with another big acquisition, and the parent firm has added more tech knowledge to its board with the addition of a former Council for Entrepreneurial Development CEO.

On Friday, Fathom Holdings, Inc. (Nasdaq: FTHM) disclosed it acquired the residential real estate brokerage business of Red Barn Real Estate, a full service brokerage firm that operates in the Greater Atlanta, Ga. area.

The move further expands the Fathom team by at least 230 additional agents, which employs more than 5,000 agents who operate in 113 local real estate markets across 27 U.S. states.

That news comes days after the company named Ravila Gupta, a former CED exec, to its board of directors.

The moves came as the firm’s top exec explained the firm’s mission to shareholders.

“As a cloud-based, technology-driven, full-service real estate brokerage, we are dedicated to providing our agents with the industry’s best commission splits, technology, training, and the highest level of support,” said Joshua Harley, Chairman and CEO.

Fathom’s footprint (Fathom image)

“My goal when creating Fathom was to build a brand that provided all of the technology, tools, training, and support that an agent would otherwise get from a large traditional brokerage but at a small flat fee per transaction,” wrote Harley in a letter to investors that was made public on the company’s website.

“While most real estate companies build their operations and workflow around how a thirdparty technology operates, we were able to rethink how to best operate a brokerage by stripping out the operational inefficiencies and then build a technology platform designed to support that new way of running the operation,” he added.  “Our technology company, intelliAgent, operates as a Software as a Service (SaaS) supporting Fathom Realty and allowing it to operate as a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering.”

New technology

That technology company, intelliAgent, announced the acquisition of the technology platform Naberly Solutions earlier in the week.

“With this acquisition, we also intend to roll out an enhanced version of the Naberly platform to launch a national real estate portal to help generate leads for our Fathom agents, as well as non-Fathom agents in the markets that we’re not in yet,” said Harley about the deal in the statement.

‘Fathom Offers’

In February, Fathom entered into a partnership with Colorado-based  zavvie, described as an end-to-end real estate brokerage platform that offers the full spectrum of selling solutions, to release a product called “Fathom Offers” that the company says allows home sellers to better review multiple options available to them in their market.

With Fathom Offers, real estate agents employed by the company will have access to additional home selling alternatives, including attracting iBuyers and providing “buy before you sell” solutions, the company said in a release announcing the partnership in February 2021.  Fathom defines an iBuyers as companies who are qualified homebuyers, typically operating as technology companies, that purchase homes for cash in as little as two weeks, without touring a property or attending an open house.  Some iBuyers and other technology-enabled real estate companies provide a “buy before you sell” option as a bridge that allows homeowners to buy their next home before selling their current home.

‘Incredibly disruptive’

Harley plans to continue to invest in technology to enable the company to expand and to generate revenue.

“We plan to incorporate multiple ways in which to generate even more revenue on each sale,” Harley wrote in the letter.  “We plan for this to include revenue streams such as: introducing an internal leads program for agents; offering mortgage and title services; and offering additional smaller ancillary services to both agents and clients.”

“I truly believe that Fathom’s technology-based platform is incredibly disruptive and the next evolution of the real estate brokerage,” he added.