AcreTrader’s newest product, Acres.com, generating huge growth
Farm real estate investment company AcreTrader is one of Arkansas’ best modern-day startup success stories, but founder and CEO Carter Malloy says the Fayetteville-based company’s newest iteration, Acres.com, has already surpassed it.
“It’s an exciting moment for our company in that Acres has actually become an even larger business than the original AcreTrader business,” said Malloy in a recent interview with the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal.
AcreTrader was launched more than seven years ago as a way to make farmland investing more accessible. It works in part like crowdfunding. Malloy’s team finds farmers who want to grow their operations. After finding a farm to buy, they raise capital through fractional shares so that a retail investor can own a piece of the farm for as little as $15,000 versus buying a million-dollar operation.
AcreTrader handles all aspects of administration and property management, from insurance and accounting to working with local farmers and improving soil sustainability. When available, AcreTrader disburses excess annual income to investors. Historically, it has an unlevered yield of 3% to 5% for lower-risk properties.
ACRES.COM
Acres.com is a land data and mapping platform that just launched a proprietary feature called Layer Library. With data for over 150 million parcels of land, Acres.com allows layers of information such as local zoning data, wildfire areas for risk, or economic opportunity zones to be placed on top of the property map. The product also allows a user to check property lines and find out who owns neighboring properties in real time.
It was borne out of a need discovered as AcreTrader continued to grow.
“We built Acres.com initially because we needed it a few years ago. We decided to put that on the Internet and see if there was commercial interest in that product. Today almost half a million people have signed up for that tool. It has seen some pretty crazy growth,” said Malloy.
“We’ve spent the past year building Layer Library to redefine what’s possible in land intelligence in answer to our customers’ needs. We made our biggest investment yet so that current and future Acres customers can map anything with ease,” he added. “We’ve been working on it quietly over the last year or so. And the ability there is really for the customer of Acres to map anything.”
Acres has developed an app that can be downloaded on Android and Apple devices.
A subscription includes access to historical satellite imagery, flood zone data, elevation data, property tax information, soil reports, and additional insights, with more planned data and features to roll out in the future.
Malloy is finding a host of target audiences for Acres.com. They range from land developers, real estate professionals, homebuilders, and appraisers who need to quickly identify and evaluate properties for acquisition or monitor market activity. Financial institutions find the tool useful for deal discovery as well as mapping and valuing property portfolios.
In the energy sector, Acres.com helps map and track infrastructure across generation and transmission grids – a feature useful for those in the renewable energy or growing data center markets.
WORKFORCE
AcreTrader and Acres.com is Fayetteville-based and employs close to 100 highly-skilled workers under one roof.
Malloy is bullish on the company’s growth potential and discloses that the private company is seeing topline revenue growth “in the triple digits” for Acres.com.
“We’re seeing some great adoption in the market and some great growth in our business and really excited to start off 2025 on the right foot,” he said.
Malloy is finding the right workers for his operation, but admits technology talent is a challenge, even in burgeoning Northwest Arkansas.
“Workforce is always an issue, especially in the world of technology and especially here in Arkansas. We simply have a supply and demand problem of technology talent, and that’s all the way from product and design to data science and backend engineering. But that’s the case everywhere and it’s fairly acute here,” he said.
“We are seeing the university and lots of other technical programs, and folks going out learning on their own – which some of the best employees we have, their experience was just going online and learning. I would say we’re seeing a growth in talent, but it is always hard. It’s always really, really hard to find incredible people to work with. That’s maybe the hardest thing we do and the thing that we are most proud of as well, is the folks I get to come to work with every day,” Malloy added.
ADVICE
Malloy, 42, grew up in Little Rock, but his family had a farm that he would spend weekends at in his youth. The experience led to a lifelong passion for agriculture and conservation.
After receiving his physics degree from the University of Arkansas, Malloy worked for seven years at investment banking firm Stephens Inc., where he spent time as a managing director of research with an emphasis on Internet and data analytics companies.
From his investment research background, he founded AcreTrader. He says he’s been given a lot of sound advice through his entrepreneurial adventures. For Malloy, he has found mentorship to be most valuable.
“I’ve been given a lot of great advice and I’ve always asked for it in this business,” he said. “I’ve been surprised certainly at the number of people that are far more advanced in their careers and far more successful than I’ll ever be. They’re willing to take time out of their day and spend time with me to help me address individual issues with questions around product market fit or scaling up a business.
“I think that’d probably be the easiest one for me, which is just ask for advice, find great mentors. Business is about evolving and learning constantly. It’s about intense self-awareness and about going out and getting as much information as you can to make, hopefully, somewhat informed decisions or bets,” he said.
You can watch a video interview with Malloy below.