A real estate agent can sell a house and still lose an afternoon to the software meant to help sell it. There is the website, the contact database, the email campaign, the social feed. Each has a password. Each would like a little attention. Prem Luthra built Elm Street Technology around the proposition that an agent’s attention had somewhere better to be.
It is a pleasantly unromantic starting point for a technology company: make the working day less tiresome. Luthra’s preferred instrument was acquisition. Bring together businesses that already understood one part of the agent’s job, then make their capabilities available together. The ambition was to give a customer fewer separate vendors to manage, while supplying more of the things that customer needed.
That proposition runs through a career involving property portals, digital marketing, corporate transactions and, now, consulting. Luthra co-founded Elm Street in 2016 and served as its founding president and CEO. In 2026 he is chief consulting officer at T3 Sixty. His subject remains the practical relationship between a business and the technology it buys. His audience now includes the founders deciding what happens to their own companies next.
Before Elm Street, a rather busy address book
Luthra attended the University of Arizona from 1990 to 1994. His working history subsequently took him through RealNet Learning, Move, Cyberhomes, LPS Real Estate Group, Real Estate Digital and Xome/Solutionstar. The titles included sales, strategy, revenue and marketing leadership. These were jobs close to the commercial machinery: finding customers, forming partnerships and working out how a product becomes a business.
At Realtor.com, he belonged to a group that also included Ben Graboske, Marty Frame and Errol Samuelson. Their careers later spread across several of real estate technology’s familiar businesses. Luthra and Frame went on to Cyberhomes. Luthra’s later Real Estate Digital chapter involved the unusually elaborate experience of a company being sold, bought back and sold again. A transaction, in this career, was rarely an abstract classroom exercise.
Before establishing Elm Street, he had been Xome’s chief marketing officer. By then, he had seen online real estate from several useful angles: the consumer looking for a home, the professional trying to win business and the company trying to make those interactions pay. The recurring commercial question was how to connect the pieces. An impressive collection of pieces could still leave the customer doing the assembly.
A company built by putting companies together
Elm Street began in 2016 with a consolidation strategy. Listingbook and RLS2000 were early acquisitions. Randall Kaplan joined as chairman through the Listingbook acquisition. Listingbook brought a platform through which consumers could explore listing and market information with their agents; RLS2000 supplied websites and social media marketing capabilities. The components had distinct jobs, and that was the attraction.
The resulting Elevate offering put digital marketing alongside property-search capabilities. Instead of asking an agent to become a purchasing department for a dozen specialist products, Elm Street proposed a more unified arrangement. Luthra was building around existing customer needs and existing businesses. The challenge was making the combined experience feel easier than the separate services had felt before.
Consolidated Knowledge subsequently added another set of capabilities. In 2017 its founder, Lucas Haldeman, described a vendor landscape so fragmented that professionals were spending unnecessary time making it work. That complaint neatly explained the opportunity Luthra was pursuing. Acquiring companies could add products, engineers and customers. Whether the result deserved a place in an agent’s day depended on what happened after those additions.
websitesClient
relationshipsMarketing
automation
One vendor. One point of contact.
Conceptual diagram of the offering described in 2020.The agent has a business to run
By October 2018, Elm Street’s acquisition of eMerge had become its fifth deal. The company also introduced 3sixtyfive, a marketing agency offering consulting, campaign development, execution and analysis. Luthra was explicit about the intended customer: smaller teams with limited marketing staff, or none. Such customers could use software, but could also use somebody to take work off their hands.
He described a system in which customers could upload contacts and choose campaigns, supported by a library of communications. Blogging provided an especially plain example of his thinking. A regularly refreshed website might help an agent’s online presence; producing the material was another recurring task in an already crowded week.
“But what Realtor do you know who has the time to post content to a blog?”
Prem Luthra, 2018
The question contains much of his sales argument. A professional should be able to obtain the benefit without adopting every associated chore. At the time, he said Elm Street had 30,000 broker and team customers across the United States and Canada. He wanted to double the company’s size in 2019. That was an ambition stated at the time, and a useful indication of the pace he wanted.
The deal that began as a conversation
The eMerge acquisition also offers a less mechanical view of Luthra’s dealmaking. Bondilyn Jolly, who led eMerge and later became Elm Street’s chief marketing officer, recalled that the initial objective had been integration. Her company was looking for CRM partners. It was not looking for a buyer. A mutual friend introduced her to Luthra, and conversations began in early 2018.
He hired her to do marketing consulting for Elm Street. As she came to understand the company’s direction, joining the businesses began to make sense. She later described eMerge as the marketing automation component of Elevate. The sequence matters: an introduction, some work together, a clearer understanding of the business, then an acquisition. The relationship had time to acquire substance before it acquired paperwork.
That episode gives a human scale to a career often described in transaction counts. Someone on the other side of the table had a company, a product and reasons to remain independent. Luthra’s proposition became more persuasive through familiarity. There is a certain economy in letting a potential colleague experience the business before asking them to join it.
Capital, Canada and a wider canvas
In February 2020, Aquiline Capital Partners invested in Elm Street. The company’s Elevate platform then served tens of thousands of agents, teams and brokerages. The announced uses of the investment were concrete: accelerate product development, expand sales and marketing, and pursue further acquisitions. Luthra had a partner for the next stage of the strategy.
Elm Street also expanded its senior leadership. In May 2021 it announced James Tallman as chairman, Robyne Gaudreau as chief financial officer and Madison Davis Kelly as executive vice president of M&A. Building a business through acquisitions required people responsible for the expanding business itself. Governance and operating capacity were becoming part of the growth story alongside the products.
July 2021 brought the acquisitions of Morris Real Estate Marketing Group and IXACT Contact Solutions. The Canadian businesses added marketing and relationship-management capabilities, as well as an established presence north of the border. Luthra’s stated attraction included Morris Marketing’s reputation and customer base. The expansion gave the existing proposition a broader North American setting.
That September, Elm Street acquired Austin-based OutboundEngine. Its marketing automation business also served mortgage and lending customers, an audience Luthra wanted to pursue more aggressively in 2022. The deal extended the logic beyond an individual agent’s technology needs into adjacent businesses. It also showed how a company assembled around one profession could find customers in the professions working beside it.
- 2016Elm Street founded; Listingbook and RLS2000 become early building blocks.
- 2020Aquiline investment supports product development and further acquisitions.
- 2023Luthra joins T3 Sixty to lead technology M&A.
“No fear!” comes with company
For all the dealmaking, Luthra also talked about the people expected to make the combined organization work. His brief instruction to staff was “No fear!” He explained it in terms of colleagues supporting one another and growing together. The reassurance depended on having people around you. It was a social description of confidence, rather than a solitary founder posing on a summit.
There were smaller expressions of that outlook. In September 2020, employees took part in an ElevateCares charity challenge, with sponsorships and a company match. They collectively logged close to 4,000 walking, running and cycling miles and raised more than $3,000 for multiple charities. An acquisition strategy makes large announcements; a staff leaderboard supplies a rather different kind of competition.
Recognition followed. Luthra appeared at number 107 in the 2022 Swanepoel Power 200, and RISMedia included him among its 2022 Newsmakers in the Achievers category. Those distinctions belonged to the period when Elm Street was becoming a larger, more varied operation. They also marked how visible a business built around simplifying other people’s working lives had become within its industry.
Now he asks founders which side of the table they want
In May 2023, T3 Sixty announced Luthra’s appointment to lead its technology mergers and acquisitions division. The firm credited him with negotiating more than 100 acquisitions and capital-raising activities across his career. The assignment put that experience to work for buyers and sellers. By August 2026, he was speaking for the firm as chief consulting officer.
His September 2026 writing addressed independent proptech founders facing consolidation, rising customer acquisition costs and customer attrition. He laid out two routes: acquire complementary products to build a broader suite, or combine with a larger business. His execution plan included preparation, the transaction and integration afterward. The signed agreement was one stage of the job.
Elm Street makes that advice unusually personal. Luthra has spent years buying specialist capabilities and trying to make the combination useful to the person paying for it. His continuing subject is what all those companies, products and negotiations finally do for somebody’s working day. An agent should have time to speak to a client. A founder should know why a deal is worth making. Both are entitled to an answer before opening another tab.