Proptech houza, a UAE-based technology company, has announced that it has raised $5.5 million in a Series A round of funding. Dubai’s leading real estate firms led the round. With such funding, Proptech houza plans to grow its team and keep establishing itself in the UAE market.
Abdullah Alajaji, Lewis Allsopp, Ryan Mahoney, and Barry Judge founded houza in 2020. It offers property listings ranked according to various factors, including performance and value content, user preferences, and searches.
Changing The UAE Real Estate Sector
Houza.com, which CEO Barry Judge co-founded in 2020, is on a mission to challenge the tenets of the UAE real estate sector by lowering listing fees for agencies and hosting only a select group of carefully vetted agencies.
With its “by the industry, for the industry” philosophy, houza’s web portal has a thorough understanding of the problems that arise during real estate transactions. According to performance and value content, the startup ranks listings. Instead of using the industry standard of “cost per listing,” the portal’s monetization strategy charges agencies per lead delivered.
On the houza web platform, listings are ranked according to the quality of the content rather than by paying to be at the top. This is advantageous to those looking for real estate because it provides a precise indication of the most in-demand properties, which are ranked according to factors like:
- The caliber of the content.
- The volume of leads coming in.
- The speed of the agent’s response, and more.
Vision For The Future
As the Pre-Series A round of funding for the startup ended, Jean-Pierre Mondalek was also named its new CEO. The company’s CEO provided his predictions for the future of the business, saying, “I will work closely with our seasoned team and agency partners to ensure we delight property seekers and real estate agents alike by being focused on building high-quality, exclusive-to-houzá content and driving leads, respectively.“
houza plans to:
- Increase its staff and keep growing its market share in the UAE.
- The startup will intensify its efforts to address recurring issues with fake and duplicate listings while also collaborating with real estate firms to introduce a variety of “first-to-market” properties on its website.
In response to the investment, co-founder Barry Judge said: “houza has made some fantastic progress over the past 18 months, and our 2022 fundraising will allow us to drive home our value propositions around “no fake listings” and “first-to-market” properties.“
