This Startup Wants to Make Your Next Move Less of a Nightmare

Moving to a new home can fill homebuyers with excitement—and dread.

The laundry list of companies that a person needs to inform about a move can feel daunting. Forgetting just a couple can mean your magazine subscriptions are lost in the mail, your bank statements wind up in a stranger’s mailbox or your lights won’t turn on the day you arrive in the new house. A new startup is aiming to help avoid these headaches by streamlining the entire process.

Updater, based in New York, allows people to quickly inform magazines, charities, alumni associations and other types of businesses of their change of address all at once from a single Web interface. Users can quickly see what utility companies offer services in their new neighborhood. The website can also help people find moving companies to make the physical move easier. Overall, the company claims it can save users five hours worth of paperwork during the moving process.

Company founder David Greenberg got the idea for Updater, unsurprisingly, when he was moving within Manhattan. “The process was just incredibly inefficient,” says Greenberg, who was a merger-and-acquisition lawyer before becoming a CEO. “I was literally making a list of the 20 businesses I need to reach out to.”

Founded in 2011, the company initially marketed its services to individual movers, but failed to gain much traction. But Greenberg had a breakthrough in 2013 when he instead decided to sell the service to real estate brokerages, which could in turn get their agents to offer it to all of their customers whenever they moved.

Updater partnered with the National Association of Realtors, which placed the startup in its tech incubator and eventually participated in an $8 million funding round as well. Courting realtors has proven to be a winning strategy: Updater is now being used at 150 real estate brokerages across the country by more than 15,000 real estate agents. In total, about 50,000 moves are now being aided with Updater each month, which the company says comprises about 5% of the total moves in the United States.

The company is still unprofitable, but Greenberg says he expects to close another funding round in the first half of 2015 and double the company’s market share by the end of the year.

Updater is one of a growing number of tech startups aimed at bringing more efficiency to the world of real estate, which can seem oddly archaic to young homebuyers used to used to making all kinds of purchases via the Internet.

“The new homebuyers who are young are really expecting a great client experience and they’re expecting great technology to help them through the transaction,” Greenberg says.

For now, the range of businesses that can be used through Updater is limited. You can’t transfer your power bill with Con Edison, for instance, or change the address on your American Express card. The startup also doesn’t handle especially sensitive info, like bank account numbers or social security numbers, which means some updates still have to be made the old-fashioned way. But the company has 10,000 businesses on board so far and expects to lure in more big fish as its user base grows. It’s also beginning to work with property managers so apartment renters can start having more seamless moves as well.

Agents say the tool is useful for keeping homebuyers happy even after signing on the dotted line, which can help boost referrals.

“Buying a home is so exciting, but once the reality sets in that you have to move all your stuff, it completely kills the joy,” says Anne Marie Gianutsos, the digital director for the real estate brokerage Houlihan Lawrence, which uses Updater to help movers in the suburbs north of New York City. “It’s stressful. Anything that’s going to make life easier for our clients, we are thrilled to offer to them.”