Luxury Presence, a marketing and technology platform for real estate agents and brokers, has come a long way since Malte Kramer launched the company in 2016.
The platform includes personalized websites for agents and offers a real estate-specific content management system and home-search tool that connects with more than 200 multiple listing service entries.
The Santa Monica-based company goes beyond helping real estate agents build their digital presence — it also handles marketing services, including managed SEO, social media and advertising.
“We launched the first version of our product with a few clients,” Kramer said. “From there, they loved it and told other agents. A lot of it in the early days was word of mouth.”
The company has been growing. Jesse Pedersen and Zac Hays recently came aboard Luxury Presence as chief technology officer and chief product officer, respectively.
Pedersen brings more than 15 years of experience in engineering and leading large-scale technical teams. Prior to Luxury Presence, he was chief technology officer for BuildingConnected, growing and scaling the company successfully until it was acquired in 2019 for $280 million by AutoDesk. Pedersen continued within AutoDesk as the vice president of customer platforms and data, leading a global team of more than 500 members.
“I am humbled to be joining Luxury Presence and support the growing technical needs of this strong and innovative company. I have always enjoyed working at companies that enable entrepreneurs in underserved industries to be successful,” Pedersen in a statement.
Hays joined Luxury Presence with more than 15 years of experience in product development at start-ups and large tech companies, including Microsoft, Nokia, and TiVo. He is also an Autodesk vet, coming through the acquisition of BuildingConnected, where he spent four years as vice president of products.
“Luxury Presence has grown exponentially and I’m looking forward to being a part of such a talented, driven group of people. I can’t wait to jump in and find new ways that we can innovate and create great products for the best agents and teams in the real estate world,” Hays said in a statement. “What drew me to the company is how Luxury Presence is solving a problem for real hard-working people in a field (real estate) that impacts everyone.”
Originally from Germany, Kramer played basketball and received a scholarship to Pepperdine University. He founded Givvr, a web platform in the nonprofit fundraising space, which folded in 2015. Then he founded Luxury Presence, and the concept took off.
“We’ve been growing very, very fast,” Kramer said. “A lot of the challenges have been managing that level of growth.”
Luxury Presence’s workforce is spread out, with about 60 employees at its Santa Monica headquarters, another 50 workers in Austin and the rest throughout the United States.
“We grew over three times,” Kramer said. “It’s been a really exciting few years now.”
Users of Luxury Presence pay a monthly subscription fee ranging from $180 to $3,000 a month.
“We have over 6,000 paying customers,” said Kramer, who added that the company will continue to enhance its services.
“We’re working on adding more marketing tools,” he said. “More ways to grow their business. Most of our R&D investment is going toward new product development.”
Kramer said that Luxury Presence has become attractive to agents because of its concise package.
“We’re a one-stop shop when it comes to marketing,” he said. “Agents love to have one company to work with for all of their marketing needs. The websites are really well designed. They like the performance and the ability to drive business for them. It helps agents grow and get them more leads.”
