Real estate platform that grew 258% during 2020, dates back a long time before its creation, when Mexican Rodrigo Sánchez-Ríos, founder and president of the business, won a scholarship to study at MIT and moved from Tijuana, in Mexico , to Boston, in the United States.
This moment in his life gave him two lessons: nothing is impossible to achieve and to achieve great things, you have to surround yourself with great people. His college experience was challenging, but his peers enriched him with competence and new insights. With this mentality he focused his career and led him to meet, at Stanford, Santiago García and Jerónimo Uribe, of Colombian origin, with whom he shared interests in real estate and who became the team with which he developed his venture.
Together they started Jaguar Capital, a real estate investment fund that gave him his first full experience in the sector. But it was not enough for Sánchez-Ríos, who also wanted to dabble in technology, the subject in which he was trained. Thus, he created LaHaus in 2019, which began operating in Medellín, then in Bogotá and finally arrived in Mexico City.
At the beginning, the tool focused on real estate developers, but little by little the business was transformed into serving the precise needs of home seekers. And as few companies have succeeded during crises, at the beginning of the pandemic, the venture grew stronger.
As it is a mobile platform that allows the search and acquisition of a home in a 100% digital way, it had a development that would have taken 10 years to achieve in pre-health contingency times.
Sánchez-Ríos hit the nail on the head. The sector was one of the furthest behind in the application of technology, but at the same time, one of those with the greatest potential and this was demonstrated during 2020, at the beginning of the health contingency when person-to-person operations were seen limited.
“Technology had been incorporated since before the pandemic, but especially for higher-value homes. Virtual visits, 360-degree photographs began to appear… But last year it began to become common in low-income and middle-income housing with very rapid growth ”, explains Rodrigo Padilla, general director of the Mexican Real Estate Bank (BIM).
The expert considers that, due to this impulse, other players and platforms also focused their strategies on digital, such as short-stay rental applications, more focused on the tourism sector, or long-term rentals, but in places outside the cities important of the country.
For BIM, more growth is still expected for digital platforms in the real estate sector. He believes that the mix between the popularity of its use and the economic recovery will trigger its demand. But to do so, they need to give certainty to users, “if we succeed in getting the real estate sector to consolidate its relationship with the authorities, the sector is going to be very dynamic. And by having an industry integrated into the platform, it will be more agile. It is not only necessary to modernize the face of the sale ”, adds Rodrigo Padilla.
