This is the Guest House pitch deck to raise a $3m seed round in 2021.
About
Guest House is a home staging and home furnishing marketplace that provides real estate services. The company’s platform simplifies the entire staging process, with real interior designers who provide in-person installations, furnishings from premium brands and local makers, and free listing photography delivered in as little as one week.
It allows homebuyers to scan a QR code to purchase anything inside staged properties – from a few products to a full room to the entire interior, making furnishing more convenient than ever before.
Guest House, a Denver-based company that combines home staging for real estate agents with both online and in-person retail, announced on Tuesday that it has raised a $3 million seed round.
The round was led by Range Ventures, a newly launched fund that focuses on Colorado-area businesses, and included funding from 87 Capital, Rucker Park Capital, and Ludlow Ventures.
This is the first venture round for Guest House, which tech-world veteran Alex Ryden founded in 2017. Now a tech-enabled home staging company, it began as a retail experiment launched out of Ryden’s own home
Ryden, at the time, was running a men’s bag and backpack company named Age Carriers, and had just moved into a new home. Frustrated with traditional retail and looking for a different way to sell his bags, Ryden decided to turn the first floor of his home into a weekend storefront, having interested shoppers check out the bags in his home.
Ryden told Insider that the founding of Guest House was a “happy accident.” His weekend customers began to ask whether they could buy the furnishings in the home which prompted Ryden to swap out his own furnishings with things that people could buy from brands like Burrow and Poly and Bark.
Real-estate agent friends encouraged him to consider outfitting the properties they were selling.
“They said ‘Why don’t you do what you’re doing in your home inside of our homes — and we will pay you to do it?’ ” Ryden said.
Home staging is the process of furnishing a home just to sell it, in the hope that real examples of how the home could be furnished will lead to a higher sale value and quicker sale. Research from the National Association of Realtors shows that 44% of buyers’ agents say staging a home increases the size of a prospective offer, and that 53% of sellers’ agents say it leads to a faster sale.
Guest House now offers home staging services, starting at $1,050 a month, in four locales: Boulder, Denver, Colorado Springs and San Diego, California. The home is staged by an interior designer, and free professional photography is bundled into the cost of staging. The company offers video tours and 3D Matterport scans for an additional cost.
The homes Guest House furnishes become a retail storefront of sorts: Anyone who tours in person can use a QR code to purchase items they see. The homebuyer can go even one step further, and with a single QR code, decide to purchase all of the furnishings in the home. The furnishings come from big retailers like Crate & Barrel, direct-to-consumer brands like Joybird, and smaller, local artisans and artists.
The company buys in bulk from major retailers at a discount, while smaller artisans are able to showcase their work in Guest House projects on consignment.
“Last year, we staged a few hundred homes, in a way, it’s the same as opening storefronts,” Ryden told Insider. “The business model is that we get paid to open stores.”
The company also has an e-commerce component: reselling the lightly used staged furniture for a discount that’s proportional to how many homes the furniture has been staged in. This marketplace is available across the US.
The company just recently expanded to San Diego, and plans to continue expanding using the funds from this venture round. Ryden said that the bootstrapped company could have continued without raising money, but that Guest House’s growth goals meant that they needed to bring in outside capital.
Funding Rounds
| Announced Date | Transaction Name | Number of Investors | Money Raised | Lead Investors |
| Jun 8, 2021 | Seed Round – Guest House | 4 | $3M | Range Ventures |
| Jan 20, 2021 | Seed Round – Guest House | 1 | — | — |
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