Spark RE Technologies Inc. has acquired Juniper for an undisclosed price, merging two Vancouver-based property technology companies with complementary services.
Juniper’s acquisition extends Spark’s offering beyond the sales and marketing timeline and into completion, warranty management and homeowner care to cover more of the real estate development journey.
The two companies have several mutual customers and have worked closely together for years. Combining the strengths of both platforms should provide a more seamless and integrated experience for homebuilders and buyers alike to offer a comprehensive one-stop solution.
Spark’s platform simplifies the complexity of new development sales by providing real-time data, analytics and communication tools.
“Spark helps developers, marketers and brokers working in pre-sale and helps them manage their contacts, marketing, contracts, inventory, et cetera, essentially from project conception to completion,” Spark president and co-founder Cody Curley said in an interview involving RENX and the two companies.
“We help them fundamentally run all their operations and processes in-house. That generally ends at completion, which is where the segue to Juniper comes in.”
Juniper’s services start where Spark’s end
“Juniper is a completion and homeowner care and warranty management platform so, effectively, where Spark ends, Juniper begins,” Juniper founder Chris Miller said, picking up where Curley left off. “We support that journey from a post-purchase perspective for pre-sale. Juniper helps the property developer manage their relationship with the homeowner once they become a purchaser.
“We have a pre-occupancy dashboard for homeowners that they can log into and understand where they’re at in that journey. And then as we get to completion, Juniper has a walk-through mobile app that allows the property developer to do the walk-through of the new home with a homeowner.
“From there they have the key pick-up event, which is facilitated by Juniper as well, to document the key details at that stage when the homeowner takes possession. Once they have the keys, Juniper becomes the portal for them to be able to manage communication and any warranty requests they might have for their property developer.
“It also acts as a resource for them for information about their home, maintenance reminders, FAQs, manuals, documents and things like that. So it becomes a resource for them to be able to understand everything about their home.”
Both companies primarily deal in the multifamily space, but Spark has been involved with single-family homes as part of master-planned communities. Juniper’s platform will support both single- and multifamily housing.
Spark and Juniper are a good fit
Spark’s origins go back to 2012, and it went through an incubation period before becoming fully realized in 2018. It works with developers, project marketing firms and new development-oriented brokerages in more than 100 cities globally.
“We can’t wait to bring the Juniper product to those markets where we already have customers, but they don’t have a comparable customer care platform that does what Juniper does,” Spark’s director of marketing and partnerships Chris Baird explained.
Among Spark’s top customers are Shape Properties, Concert Properties, Ledingham McAllister, Intracorp, SmartCentres and the new development marketing teams for Douglas Elliman, Sotheby’s International Realty and Engel & Volkers.
Juniper launched in 2019 and it has grown to provide homeowner care for more than 12,000 units and 60 projects from Canadian developers. Much of its activity has been focused in British Columbia to this point.
Integration is already underway
“We’re able to fold into a really strong team at Spark from a market presence perspective, but also with additional resources that we can utilize with different teams and individuals to deliver additional value to our customers,” Miller said.
Integrating the two technologies was the first area to be tackled. While it’s the hardest thing to do from a practicality standpoint, it’s the easiest way to provide value for customers.
Spark’s team of about 40 people is now integrating Juniper’s three full-time people and contractors. While the core team is based in the Vancouver office, it has a small number of employees in Toronto, the United Kingdom, Europe and Colombia.
“As excited as we are to acquire the Juniper product, we’re also just as excited to acquire the Juniper team, led by Chris,” Baird said. “The expertise and skill that they bring to our culture is massive and a huge part of the deal.”
Further growth envisioned for Spark
“For a couple of years now I’ve been focusing on making sure that we can identify either integration partners or potential acquisition targets that provide additional value to the chain both horizontally and vertically,” Curley said. “We’re always looking for things that extend the value within the project or deepen the vertical value chain within the developer’s ecosystem.”
“Many of our features that we’ve built, or changes that we’ve made to our platform, have come directly from customer requests,” Baird added.
“Once something gets requested enough times, we move it to the front of our road map to execute. We’ve always considered it very important to listen to our customers and build what they want, and we’ve had many people suggest working closer with Juniper.”
Curley said Sparks’ acquisition of Juniper is “proof that Canadian property technology is something to watch out for,” as companies involved in real estate are “starting to realize that technology is something that they should be investing in.”