REDIST, a proptech startup seeking to demystify real estate tax breaks, completed a round of seed funding and soft-launched a platform to show developers and brokers how to make better use of tax incentives.
Some $100 billion of incentives go unused each year because they’re too complicated or too obscure, the company says. A full launch is planned for 2022, cofounder Atif Qadir said in an interview. Users will be able to aggregate data on incentives buried in city, state and federal law and eventually apply for them through the platform.
Applying for public funding can be “a really arduous process,” said Qadir, who previously spent three years as an associate at Extell, the New York developer. “When I talked to friends at peer companies, it seemed like everyone was doing it the same inefficient, repetitive way.”
One reason: Real estate incentives frequently change — when a state revises its budget, for example, or when political power shifts to a different party. Qadir and cofounder Jonathan Kuo designed the platform with real estate principles in mind.
“We’ve been exploring the nuances of how other real estate professionals can use information like this to advance their own goals and their own workflows,” he said.
REDIST, based in New York, doesn’t have a direct competitor that focuses exclusively on incentives, according to Qadir. The challenge will be to convince real estate professionals that prospective tax breaks are worth investigating.
REDIST raised $1.9 million in its seed round. The largest investor was San Francisco-based venture capital firm Hometeam Ventures. Others included Park West and New York Ventures, the venture capital division of Empire State Development.
The company plans to weigh a Series A fundraising round in a year’s time, Qadir said.
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