Melbourne Start-Up Allows Buyers to Target Off-Market Homes

A Melbourne-based proptech start-up is striving to re-engineer the real estate market status-quo.

The fledgling property platform, Nokk, connects buyers directly with owners in an attempt to bring offline houses online through a digital conversation or door knock.

Owners are given the opportunity to post their homes for free and if they chose to do so, anonymously.

If an offer is made within the owners price range a conversation with the qualified buyer can begin.

The software aims to avoid real estate agents or listed properties, focusing exclusively on un-listed real estate.

The startup was founded by former commodities banker William Evans, along with Ben Voltz, co-founder of the popular marketing tech startup Rokt.

After stepped down from the day-to-day operations of Rokt, Voltz came up with the idea for Nokk after struggling to find the right house in a sought after suburb of Albert Park in Melbourne.

Voltz found that a mere 15 properties were listed at any given time out of 5,000 potential properties, with only one within his price range.

After numerous letter box drops enquiring if owners might be interested in selling, Voltz came up with the idea to connect owners and buyers in real estate, similar to modern dating applications.

"It was glaringly obvious” Voltz said.

"I could not believe the response rate to these letter drops, there are so many latent properties willing to have a genuine conversation at the right price.”

Nokk was eventually given the tick of approval by high-profile venture capitalist Cadmon Ventures, managing director of Cameron Low, in the form of a $1 million injection.

The real estate software, now 18 months old, has already on-boarded 7,000 users and has almost 3,000 properties currently listed.

“Our goal is to have hundreds of thousands of Australian properties on the platform within 18 months,” Voltz said.