La Haus, a Colombian-based real estate startup, has raised $10 million in Series A funding thanks to contributions coming from Zillow Group's co-founder Spencer Rascoff and Trulia co-founder Pete Flint.
NFX, where Pete Flint is a managing partner, led the funding round, along with Kaszek Ventures, Acrew Capital, the Housing Wire report said. La Haus also got financial backing from other investors, including Acrew Capital; Beresford Ventures; IMO Ventures; David Velez, founder of Nubank; Brian Requarth, Vivareal founder; Nori Gerardo Lietz, Harvard Business School venture capital professor; and Hadi Partovi, Code.org founder.
La Haus is a 3-year old company that aims to bring technology-backed real estate services to the Latin American market. La Haus provides consumers with digital tools for closing real estate transactions, with transactions totaling $250 million in value each year, Reuters noted.
Flint said that Latin America is still very early on its infancy as far as having really professional agents and brokerages. And while an average home takes only six weeks at most to be sold, in Latin America, that takes 14 months, Rodrigo Sánchez Ríos, La Haus chief financial officer, said.
In a statement, Flint and NFX provided three reasons why they invested in La Haus: a world-class team with local expertise, in-depth market and industry knowledge, and good timing. The strength of Jerónimo Uribe and Rodrigo Sánchez Ríos and their global network gives them the ability to "bring on world-class talent," Flint explained.
"They know the LatAm real estate inside and out," he furthered. With an estimated residential real estate worth of $10 trillion and over 150 million residential units, LatAm is a large addressable market - high fragmented and inefficient.
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The timing is perfect for La Haus, and the market needs that the company is addressing. And given that the LatAm has no equivalent of the Multiple Listing Service that the U.S has, La Haus is a startup that is in the right market at the right time, Flint concludes.
For Kaszek Ventures co-founder and managing partner, La Haus showed many of the ingredients that made many companies successful: a world-class team with complementary skills, a large addressable market, and founders' almost religious zeal to solve a big problem with technology.
Jerónimo Uribe and Rodrigo Sánchez Ríos, both Stanford University graduates, co-founded La Haus. Where La Haus started, Bogotá and Medellín, the market shared, has risen from four percent to almost 30 percent during the pandemic. Meanwhile, Mexico City, where the startup started its operation in 2019, now accounts for 25 percent of its business.
Through the help of its founders' colleagues in the real estate development, La Haus began with listings of new developments, the Tech Crunch report said. Now, their service has a mix of both existing and new developments for sales.
The company now has expanded its geographic footprint in Colombia and Mexico with about 500 developers listing properties in Colombia and another 200 developers in Mexico. There have been more than 2,000 transactions facilitated so far using their platform.
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