Five years of transforming home-buying
Buying a property can often involve a complex and frustrating journey. Justus, CEO and founder of Acre, experienced these common home-buying challenges firsthand back in 2017, which set the stage for Acre to be born…
2018
Acre was founded in 2018, driven by a vision to revolutionise the mortgage industry.
Central to Acre's innovation was the adoption of new, ground-breaking technology and the help from industry experts that Justus and his team at Founders Factory worked alongside for a year. At the end of 2018, we raised our seed funding which allowed us to start building the team.
2019
In 2019, with our seed funding in hand, we were able to start writing code and grow our team of tech leaders and industry experts. As a result, we were able to launch a private Beta version of our product to a group of early Acre adopters. These firms loved what the team had built and the technology proved able to help save brokers time and enable their clients to buy homes more efficiently. What we should have known is that these firms would change too - some stopped trading, others merged, and our contacts changed. We kept building though!
2020
We moved to a new office, but only got to use it for a couple of months. Despite being locked indoors due to the pandemic, the Acre team continued to add to the platform’s capabilities. Adding game-changing features and collaborating (remotely!) with partners to integrate ever more useful solutions into our platform. Notable integrations included:
The pandemic caused even more changes with our partner firms - but we kept our heads up and kept building.
2021
After just two years and a LOT of hard work, Acre was ready to go to market. The unique technology was built to manage the mortgage journey in its entirety, with an unrivalled approach ensures brokers and lenders get the best outcomes for customers every time.
The market’s reaction has been great -
“It’s just a very easy system to get. It’s very powerful, but it’s done in a very simple, easy to interact with way”
📣 Cornerstone Network
“It’s just much easier and more user friendly for the broker, but also it’s easy for the client as well. And that’s ultimately what it’s about, about making their process as easy as possible.”
📣 Shaw Financial Services
“It’s very easy from a management point of view, to manage the business and actually see what’s happening. It’s that kind of good overview not just of what I’m doing, but what the whole business is doing”
📣 Mortgage Advice Brokerage
2022
2022 saw us ramping up our market share and growing our team’s headcount nearly 50%. We saw a 4X growth in our user base, helped over 25,000 homebuyers, and won our first award as the winner of the Best Digital Solution Provider at FinTech Futures’ Banking Tech Awards.
We also closed in on some more funding from existing and new investors - no small feat in the current startup market!
2023
This year, five years on from the first line of Acre code being written, Acre will complete over £10 billion in mortgages for over 100,000 homebuyers.
Acre has been voted number 23 in PropTech 50’s most innovative UK property tech firms and won Best Use of Blockchain Technology at the UK FinTech Awards. Our CEO, Justus has been recognised as one of Mortgage Introducer’s Innovator Champions of the Year and Acre have also been shortlisted in the MoneyAge and upcoming Mortgage Finance Gazette awards for Technology Provider of the Year.
Most importantly, we’ve onboarded impressive, tech-lead firms, clubs and networks… with some announcements that will surprise and delight coming soon.
In just over just five years, Acre has built a solution with the power to truly transform the mortgage industry - combining innovation, technology, and a commitment to simplifying the property-buying journey. So what’s next? We think one of the best times to be a disruptor is in a market downturn.
With a lot in our pipeline and our sights set on an even brighter future, Acre is more confident than ever that we can transform the way people buy homes!