A screenshot of a Weston house's listing on Final Offer. Image courtesy of Final Offer

Final Offer, a listing tech startup that’s been gaining steam in the Massachusetts and Washington, D.C. markets announced it had crossed a major milestone this week.

The company closed its $5 million series A funding round on Nov. 1 using only money from real estate agent and trainer investors, CEO Tim Quirk said in an interview.

The company had earlier raised $3 million in seed funding from venture capital firms and leading real estate agents in both the Boston and D.C. markets last spring.

“We were astonished not just that [real estate agents] wanted to invest but how much they wanted to invest,” he said “When we went to raise our series A, we went to real estate agents who were using the platform and showed a passion for it and said there’s an opportunity to invest.”

Final Offer aims to bring transparency to the process of buying a home by letting members of the public sign up to be notified when an offer is made on a home listed on its platform. Only pre-approved buyers working with licensed real estate agents are able to make offers. The effect, the company says, is to both focus buyers’ minds and make the stakes clear instead of having to guess how many other offers have been made on a property and how serious those offers are.

Its signature feature, available as an option to seller’s agents, lets sellers commit up front to a price and a set of terms that they would be willing to agree to automatically sell at, and started a countdown clock for other offers if a prospective buyer met that.

“When you look at homes online you see a list price, but that doesn’t mean anything. It’s just an advertising number. The seller doesn’t have to accept an offer that comes in for the list price,” Quirk said. “For everyone to then change and confirm to a price and terms a seller had to commit to is a fundamental shift.”

While only 35 percent of the roughly 350 homes sold using the platform in the last year and a half used the company’s signature feature, Quirk said, modifying the Final Offer platform to allow traditional listings while retaining its offer-management tools has let the company ink deals with brokerages, not just traditional listing agents. The company had been charging listing agents $200 per home posted to the platform or subscriptions costing between $500 and $1,000 depending on how long they ran.

Quirk said the company now has a dozen brokerages subscribed including Melrose-based Leading Edge Real Estate, Martha’s Vineyard-based Donnelly & Co. and Andover-based Lillian Montalto Signature Properties.

“We can integrate all their listings into final offer and just expose a list price; then each agent can decide how they want to handle their listing,” he said. “We had almost 500 listings on the platform in the last year, and we’re going to have around 2,000 listings on the platform in the next 90 days and it’s going to continue to expand.”

The company claims its platform delivers results. By creating a quasi-auction environment where sellers can chose to make some or all details of the offers they get public, along with their own desired sale price and terms, Quirk said, the properties sold on its platform have beat the average list price-to-sale price ratio in their local markets by 200 basis points in urban areas and 700 basis points in suburban areas.

“At the same time, people buying the properties have been thrilled with the process. They’ve had clarity if there’s another offer on the table,” Quirk said. “That type of certainty in the residential real estate market hasn’t existed until now.”