For the startup Flat, in charge of processes that range from the purchase and sale of real estate, negotiations with real estate agents, to financing, the advantage of Flat is to offer a catalog of solutions available to anyone who needs to carry out a housing operation.
Bernardo Cordero, founder of Flat, said that the proptechs that manage to form an ecosystem of the universe of housing operations are the ones that manage to make a difference in the rest of the real estate market.
“Our model is how we can cover all the needs of a seller, of a buyer on the same platform and that is what we are building,” said Bernardo Cordero.
Information, the solution for a bureaucratic business
However, this Mexican startup has identified a series of challenges that hinder the progress achieved through technology, whether to buy, be a real estate agent or to obtain financing.
The lack of reliable data on the housing market, which affects the difficulty of establishing the price of a property with certainty, was one of the first challenges.
“First the data part, the information, we have been collecting information in the last three years, to better understand the valuation of properties in the market,” explained Cordero.
“Without market information you can’t make any of the products we already have.”
The manager recalled that in countries like the United States, information is more open and there are even associations that share their results and that data is open, so he considered that one of the pending issues in Mexico is more openness of public agencies and more work in group of the main players in the industry.
selective collection
For Flat, obtaining reliable information is the main thing, so they still look for data between real estate agents, as well as for each of the properties that enter their inventory, with a meticulous inspection, whose information is backed up with the help of technology.
“When we do the inspections we have our app, we get 200 inspection points or property information. We put all this data together to be able to create the models, that is the challenge”, assured the co-founder of Flat.
“There is no one source from which you say the property is worth ‘so much’ or traded for ‘so much,’ you have to gather information from many places.
Bureaucracy in the real estate sector
“The typical vendor in Mexico takes a year or a year and a half to sell, that’s crazy,” Cordero said.
And it is that this process is so long due to the number of procedures and requirements requested, so for Flat this cycle represents a business opportunity to make these operations materialize in a couple of months and even in days.
“In more developed markets you find that, that transactions take between two or three months, in Mexico a year and a half, and that is what we try to work on, close that gap,” assured the Flat manager.
For the entrepreneur, just as the online shopping sector advanced rapidly, real estate purchases may also be closed completely online, but this process is just starting.
Quick profits, what startups want
Closing a real estate operation that in just a day or weeks attends to the entire chain of processes of buying and selling a property not only reduces bureaucracy. Rather, it allows almost immediate liquidity to be given to the market and even to take advantage of the home as an asset with multiple benefits when owning it.
“In the market, young people are used to very simple processes if they are buying online, if they are taking out a financial product, but the world of real estate scares them a lot because of these complicated processes,” said Cordero.
“At the moment that the processes are facilitated, more people are encouraged to create heritage through a good”, he emphasized.
