Whatever Happened To Tycoon Real Estate After Shark Tank?

Real estate shenanigans may be a TV genre mostly confined to the realm of HGTV, but there is at least one notable time that the subject made its way onto ABC's "Shark Tank." Back in 2015, one of the various pitches to feature on Season 6 of the show was former AT&T vice president Aaron McDaniel's business, Tycoon Real Estate.

As its name suggests, TycoonRE is conceived as a web-based real estate crowdfunding platform that allows users to invest in property quickly and easily. In an ideal scenario, customers could make minuscule investments that would balloon into massive gains, transforming them into bona fide real estate tycoons. For some, the thrust of TycoonRE might sound too good to be true — or, perhaps, idealistic to a fault. That's certainly what the Sharks think, as McDaniel and his business walk out of "Shark Tank" with no deal secured. 

However, TycoonRE's failure to land a deal on the show didn't spell the end of the company, and viewers may be interested to hear whether the business ever found success or if things kept tumbling downhill. The answer is, to put it simply, somewhere in the middle.

Aaron McDaniel's TycoonRE pitch to the Sharks marks one of the various times that "Shark Tank" got rather heated. The entrepreneur enters the Tank hoping for a $50K investment in exchange for a 5% stake in the company, but that proves to be quite a daunting task almost immediately.

Even before McDaniel finishes introducing the concept behind TycoonRE, Mark Cuban expresses that he hates the idea and is dropping out early, making for quite an uncomfortable moment. While the other Sharks aren't necessarily as reactionary to the pitch, they are similarly unenthused and feel that the business is an unproven concept and has many potential flaws. One by one, all of them drop out until just Kevin O'Leary is left. The host makes a hail mary counteroffer to McDaniel of $50K in exchange for 50% ownership of TycoonRE, but the entrepreneur doesn't take the deal.

In a subsequent interview with KF Brand Studio, McDaniel elaborated on why he decided to reject O'Leary's deal. According to the businessman, he had privately received seed funding valued at 25 times the valuation of O'Leary's offer. "There was really no way I could accept it and still be true and uphold my fiduciary responsibilities to my other investors, and so I had to say no," he explained.

Aaron McDaniel and TycoonRE may not have had the most positive "Shark Tank" experience, but the business did gain one thing from featuring on the show: the "Shark Tank" effect. Indeed, like many other products and services to appear on the series, consumer attention toward TycoonRE skyrocketed immediately after its episode aired. In fact, it reached the point where the company's website crashed due to high traffic. "Ultimately, we got thousands of new users for our platform and a lot of publicity for it," McDaniel told KF Brand Studio. However, the biggest impact of the "Shark Tank" effect was still yet to come.

In November 2015, mere months after TycoonRE featured on "Shark Tank," the now-infamous business was acquired by a group of five major crowdfunding platforms, including companies like American Homeowner Preservation, Patch of Land, and Peer Realty. With the deal, TycoonRE became the first ever real estate crowdfunding platform to be acquired. In the press release announcing the news, Patch of Land CEO Jason Fritton said that the joint venture would be an opportunity to "set the record straight" on TycoonRE after its controversial TV appearance.

While TycoonRE reached some major positive milestones in the span of time after its appearance on "Shark Tank," its status today is rather complicated. It's not completely clear what happened to TycoonRE as an entity after it was acquired by the consortium of five crowdfunding companies, but that's not to say that the veteran "Shark Tank" company doesn't exist anymore. Instead, information seems to indicate that the venture was rebranded and potentially absorbed into another company.

The original URL for TycoonRE's website now redirects to the website for a real estate investment company called preREO. The business focuses on facilitating consumer investments on discounted mortgages. It functions on a crowdfunded model that emphasizes a low barrier to entry, granting users the ability to make small investments — which all sounds quite similar to the original model for TycoonRE. In essence, it seems that the spirit of TycoonRE lives on, even if it's going by a different name these days.

When Aaron McDaniel sold TycoonRE to the crowdfunding consortium in 2015, he also took his leave from the company. Since then, he has founded and worked at a number of other successful businesses, including an e-commerce security company called IP Shark, a real estate private equity fund called Velocity Capital Group, and a consulting firm named Global Class. From his diverse portfolio of ventures, it's clear that the businessman is still firmly rooted in the field of entrepreneurship, and there's every chance the future will see him working to build yet another company from the ground up.

Aside from his personal endeavors, McDaniel is also actively taking an interest in teaching the next generation of entrepreneurs. Since 2017, he has worked as an adjunct professor teaching entrepreneurship courses at the University of California, Berkeley. In the interview with KF Brand Studio, McDaniel revealed that he shares his uncomfortable "Shark Tank" segment with his students in order to teach them how to persevere through failure. "The core of it was the importance of overcoming the obstacles of failure and not giving up," he said.