JF Capital Collaborates With Partner Fusion To Launch Brixio

They know tech, we know commercial real estate and we both want to do more than solve a problem, we want to create the future. We believe that future is Brixio.

In most instances, companies are formed for a simple reason — opportunity arises, and those who are brave enough to venture into the great unknown form a business, then spend time, money, and effort trying to capture that opportunity and turn it into something tangible.

Brixio is being launched because there is opportunity in the commercial real estate industry. This opportunity centers on combining technology with the commercial real estate market, simplifying transactions in a way that they believe will transform the process of buying and selling.

“If you look at commercial real estate, it’s very supply-sided,” Daniel Nelson, CEO of Partner Fusion, told Beehive Startups in a recent interview. “It’s dominated by banners and names on buildings. It’s a market that has not caught up — in the digital world — to other industries like hotels. We don’t drive around a downtown area looking for a hotel, we do it on our phones, we do it on our devices. Today, in commercial real estate, people still drive around looking for names and phone numbers on buildings. And then there’s a tremendous bottleneck getting through the reception and actually make contact with that broker. So we see an incredible opportunity to innovate on the buyer side of this equation.”

Brixio is a joint venture being launched by two Utah-based companies: JF Capital, a boutique real estate investment firm that has completed $700 million worth of real estate acquisitions and developments; and Partner Fusion, a marketing and technology incubator whose portfolio includes TravelPASS Group, Ticket Counter, and PageLaunch.

Initially, both companies were working independently on a similar problem, trying to solve the lack of information and responsiveness that has plagued the world of commercial real estate transactions. They were connected and out of this union, a beautiful baby was born: Brixio.

“Modern technology has changed almost all aspects of our lives, yet had minimal influence on our day-to-day business,” said Nate Bray, Partner at JF Capital. “We saw a clear opportunity to innovate as we managed modern deals on legacy platforms in traditional ways. Several key questions kept resurfacing: If commercial real estate is a relationship business, why are we not leveraging social platforms? If most commercial real estate deals get done outside of the office, why are we not using mobile technology? If commercial real estate deals require collaboration across multiple stakeholders, why are we not collaborating via the cloud? Finally, if we live in the information age where trends can be analyzed, where is all our data? Those questions led us right to Partner Fusion. They know tech, we know commercial real estate and we both want to do more than solve a problem, we want to create the future. We believe that future is Brixio.”

You like information, right? I’m going to assume you do, mainly because I’m going to assume you have a brain allowing you to comprehend this article. Being able to consume information quickly and efficiently is a must in 2016 — this is why we carry around smartphones that act as lightning-quick gateways to the wonderful world of information, where anyone can wander and learn to their heart’s content.

The commercial real estate market should be no different, but it is. Information is hard to come by, sellers are surprisingly unresponsive, and transacting through a mobile phone is strictly taboo.

Fear not, dear millennials, because Brixio is ready to change that, by building tools that can bring a lagging industry into the 21st century.

“We saw an opportunity to really disrupt the commercial real estate market, in terms of enabling buyers and sellers to come together at a faster rate, opening up transparency and ease of information flow so that transactions happen faster,” Nelson said. “This market needs to be able to transact on a mobile phone. The tools that we’re looking forward to announcing in the future will be very Tinder- or Uber-like in a consumer’s ability to do all of this on a mobile device.”

Both JF Capital and Partner Fusion recently invested in Brixio’s seed round, with Nelson estimating that within 3–6 months, they will be releasing technology that will drastically improve the way transactions take place within the commercial real estate world.

In the meantime, Brixio will continue to embrace the ultimate challenge — building a company.

“Our view is, this is a game changer,” Nelson said. “We’re going to speed up connectivity and information sharing that will put buyers and sellers together like never before.”

Published 2/1/2016