2 weeks ago
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Buying a home has always been complicated. You have to figure out how much money to put down and how that down payment will affect a monthly mortgage bill. Then there are the closing costs and fees. Kevin Bennett launched Further to try to help make the financial process easier to navigate — especially for first-time buyers.
Further is a fintech platform that walks users through the financial side of home buying. The company’s first product, which goes live Friday, is a calculator that shows what people can afford and what their monthly mortgage payments and closing costs could look like, among other metrics based on real-time interest rates.
Unlike other mortgage calculators that you can find on Zillow and LendingTree, Further looks to give users more than the numbers. It tells users how easy it will be for them to find a loan based on their financial status, whether they should wait to buy, or if they should pursue specific types of loans based on their financial profile, among others.
The platform is currently free to use. The company plans to monetize once it releases more product developments but declined to share details.
“A generation ago, our parents bought a $200,000 home with a 20% mortgage, and it was very straightforward,” Bennett said. “There was one kind of mortgage, and that’s what you did and it’s just more complicated. There are lots of kinds of mortgages. There are lots of implications. Homes are much more expensive now, so there’s just a lot more complexity, and it’s a much bigger financial decision.”
Last year Bennett found himself looking for something new to work on after stepping back from Caribou, the auto loan refinancing startup he co-founded in 2016 and where he served as CEO. He knew he wanted to do something else mission-oriented but wasn’t sure where.
He started looking into real estate, a category he said he’s always been fascinated with. The fact that his whole family works in real estate helped, too. He started talking to folks who had purchased their home within the last two years and found a lot of common pain points: People didn’t understand the process and were relying on homemade spreadsheets to try to figure out what they could afford.
Bennett also had a personal experience: He bought and sold a townhouse in his 20s and was surprised to find out he endured a $30,000 loss, despite selling the home for the original purchase price. That’s because he missed out on certain home improvements that could’ve increased the house’s value.
“You can’t hit the undo button once you buy that house,” Bennett said. “It felt like there was a gap in the market. It felt like it was a lot more complicated than it was a generation ago.”
He reached out to his friend Chris Baker, a real estate expert, and former head of product at EasyKnock, about his idea last year. The pair got to work fast. Their first conversation was November 3, 2023. They decided to work together in January, launched the product in April, and raised an undisclosed pre-seed round in June. Now, they are coming out of stealth.
“Our goal is to take care of the complicated jargon and stuff and really help you understand as easily as possible what it is you need to know, with transparency, obviously, but also putting you in the driver’s seat and in control,” he said.
The company’s previously undisclosed pre-seed round raised $4.1 million from investors including Link Ventures, Vesta Ventures, and Fidi Ventures, among others. Bennett said that fundraising wasn’t too challenging, as half of the capital the company raised was from investors who backed him while he was at Caribou. Bennett thinks his track record as a founder made a big difference. The company built its cap table intentionally to include angel investors who have experience in the real estate market, he said.
This kind of financial information and guidance seems like something a Zillow or Redfin would be ripe to copy especially considering Zillow already offers a mortgage calculator and some advice of its own. But Bennett said he wasn’t super concerned about the competition. He said he thinks that many companies either fall on the proptech side or the fintech side and rarely in the middle, as Further does, which gives it more of a moat.
But Further is definitely not the only company that sits between proptech and fintech that is aimed at consumers. Online mortgage startup Better.com, which allows consumers to browse for mortgage options or refinance an existing one, is a good example.
It will likely depend on what Further unveils in its planned Q1 product release that will include more features and capabilities, but Bennett didn’t share too many details just yet. For now, users can use Further to get an idea of what they can afford and what they can expect to pay when buying a house.
“My hope is that we can enable people with the right insights and information to make good decisions and plan for this really big part of their life in a way that gives them confidence, puts them at ease and and lets them focus on, you know, what they really want to focus on, which is kind of that that dream of being a homeowner,” Bennett said.
