The team at La Haus is aiming to do for South America what Zillow has done for the United States. The region’s real estate market has long-suffered from a lack of central repository where homebuyers and sellers can find out price histories. There are no centralised and reliable systems, something that many might take for granted in the US and UK when they want to search for property data. La Haus co-founder Rodrigo Sanchez-Rios, in an interview with Crunchbase, pointed out that the key obstacle to home-buying is the absence of a trustworthy multiple listing service. He also pointed out that the average time taken to sell a property in South America is fourteen months.
La Haus, based in Medellín and which recently raised $35m in Series B funding from investors including Trulia co-founder Peter Flint and Zillow co-founder Spencer Rascoff, has built a platform which streamlines these historically slow processes. The proptech’s property listing service is combined with a brokerage platform which facilitates entirely digital transactions in an end-to-end marketplace. A particular focus of the company has been de-duplication, since the continent’s real estate markets, especially in Colombia, are awash with redundant information. Properties for sale are easily sifted through and analysed, such as these environmentally friendly apartments in Envigado, a town south east of Medellín: https://www.lahaus.com/nuevo/bosque-sagrado/envigado.
Over 4,000 transactions have already been made via the platform. It is hoped that by both simplifying and rendering trustworthy the infrastructure surrounding the homebuying process, South America’s population will more readily adopt online transactions and thus home ownership rates will rise, an exciting prospect.