Pete Flint knows about bad timing. He founded one of the most popular online real estate marketplaces, Trulia, in 2005, just a few years before the onset of the financial crisis wrought by the massive bust in the housing market. About three years after the crisis, he managed to take his company public via an IPO, before merging it with Zillow in 2015. Now a general partner at early-stage VC firm NFX, Flint has a different perspective. And while the market today is nowhere near as dire as 2008, he says now is actually a good time to invest in real estate startups.
As an investor, it’s a “tough sector, because you're not only seeing the multiple compression on the tech side, but you've also seen a decrease in demand. ...Transaction volume has come down” for housing, Flint told me recently at the New York Hilton Midtown hotel bar on the sidelines of a real estate conference. But, “The flip side is, it's probably the single best time to be investing in real estate startups,” he argued.
