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Real estate tech investor Fifth Wall launches $500M fund

Double the size of the LA-based firm’s initial real estate fund, this round attracted global investors.

Fifth Wall co-founders Brendan Wallace and Brad Greiwe (Credit: Jeff Newton)
Fifth Wall co-founders Brendan Wallace and Brad Greiwe (Credit: Jeff Newton)

UPDATED, July 17, 12:31 p.m.: Venture capital firm Fifth Wall closed on a $503 million fund focused on investments in real estate technology.

Known as Fund II, it is the largest fund launched to date with a focus on real estate technology investment, the firm said Wednesday. In addition to local investors including CBRE, Cushman & Wakefield and Equity Residential, Fifth Wall attracted investors from France, Spain, the United Kingdom, Japan and Singapore.

RELATED STORY: Fifth Wall’s Brendan Wallace on how he got CRE heavyweights onboard for his $500M tech fund

The Los Angeles-based venture capital firm, which was launched in 2016 by Blackstone Group alumni Brad Griewe and Brendan Wallace, now has $1 billion under management. The firm has an ever-growing portfolio of investors, and typically directs investments to startups that can provide a service to its partners.

The firm is among the largest conduits for investment in the real estate tech space and has pooled funding for flexible office startup Industrious, house-flipping company Open Door and analytics firm VTS.

It counts most institutional real estate firms among its investors, including Hines, Hudson Pacific Properties, Lennar, Macerich and Related Companies.

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Fifth Wall started raising money for the fund about a year ago, closing it just four months later, Wallace told The Real Deal in an interview. To them, the bigger the fund, the better for prop-tech.

“A lot of the advancement that’s going to occur in that sort of environment is going to be premised on these technologies gaining significant traction,” said Griewe. “The size of the pie increases. New realms of revenue will open up.”

“We can give an individual portfolio company so much access, so many introductions, that there’s no single real estate owner that can represent the kind of distribution that Fifth Wall has,” added Wallace. “And that’s not necessarily because of Fifth Wall — that’s because of the corporate LPs we’ve been able to bring together.”

Its first real estate tech fund, a $212 million raise that included only U.S.-based partners, launched in May 2017. That round included CBRE, Prologis, Hines, Lennar, Host Hotels & Resorts, Equity Residential and Macerich.

Last year, the venture capital firm launched a separate fund to target retail technology, in a round that generated $200 million.

Natalie Hoberman contributed reporting.