From "Co-Investing" to "Instant Sell", Business Models that are being Validated Startup Proptech Equity Home

Last year, the property market in Indonesia plummeted due to the Covid-19 pandemic. However, the current vaccine distribution process is considered by a number of stakeholders to be able to boost the property market again in 2021.

Quoting Cash, CEO of Indonesia Property Watch (IPW) Ali Tranghanda predicts a recovery in this sector can occur in the second half of 2021. landed house will be in demand this year, while houses in the price range of Rp 500 million-Rp 1 billion are estimated to be the driving force for the recovery of the property sector.

Meanwhile, as reported Business, Chairman of the Indonesian Proptech Association Rusmin Lawin said that the industry is required to implement technology in property development (proptech). That way, this industry can survive and get used to the effectiveness and efficiency proptech after the pandemic.

In the midst of the current situation, pass proptech Indonesia has now returned to give birth to a new player, namely Ekuitas Home. This platform was developed by Jume Analyes with Dede Kiswanto. For your information, previously Jume had also built two lifestyle and recreation platforms, namely: web marketplace SelenaID and the social app SelenaGo in 2015.

DailySocial had the opportunity to know about Jume and Dede's journey in developing the Home Ekuitas platform since 2020. Check out the following interview:

Experiment with products to find market fit

Home Equity offers a property buying and selling feature through a scheme co-invest, rent-to-own (Quick Buy), and sell instant (Instant Sell). In addition, this platform also offers a Dataruma feature that offers information about prices appraisal and the location of the house you want to buy or sell instantly and digitally.

For instant selling, the process takes the fastest 20 working days, while rent-to-own takes 2 years. Equity does not take commission for instant sales, but through the scheme rent-to-own with a commission of 2% of the agreed selling price.

In his interview, Jume mentioned that the idea of ​​developing Equity has been sparked since the end of 2019, it is currently being considered to explore the scheme through crowdfunding land purchase. However, this idea was discontinued considering the complex process of verifying land purchase documents.

"That's why we don't use it through crowdfunding, but co-invest for home purchases. From there, we started to develop co-invest from early March to October 2020. But along the way this scheme doesn't work, maybe because our network of investors who want to contribute to the purchase of home assets is limited," he said.

Then, the company tried another scheme, namely: rent-to-own (Quick Buy) which was released in November 2020. Through this scheme, consumers can buy a house with an initial annual rental agreement, then the house can be purchased in cash or a mortgage. This rent is a down payment for the purchase of a house.

However, he was constrained again with capital considering that Home Equity had to acquire the property at the outset. "To be efficient, we buy at the beginning, rent, then sell. Unfortunately, we again do not have the capability to acquire houses," he added.

Furthermore, Home Equity is again experimenting with the Instant Sell scheme or helping home sellers in 7 days. This means, within 7 days, the company can find a buyer or investor who wants to acquire this house. However, the company is also hampered by capital capabilities.

"Instant Sell means instantly connect with buyer, not sold. It value-his. For Quick Buy, we cut the process, from negotiation, price information, location data, to verified listings. We are still trying to propose rent-to-own in parallel."

Dataruma products pocket traction

"From the experiment, we then think what basic problem from the seller or the buyer, namely the price. Sellers are sometimes confused about determining prices. Likewise, buyers, whether worth it the price, is the location strategic? And that [house search] data is still ffragmented which we have to look for on the internet and so on," Jume continued.

Departing from this, Jume then developed a new product that was released in February 2021, namely Dataruma. According to him, the growth of Dataruma's services is positive, where the realization of Dataruma's growth has been achieved in three weeks since its launch compared to the overall growth of Home Equity which has only been achieved for three months (October 2020-January 2021).

Dataruma is said to have reached product market fit with more than 500 requests coming from segment consumers. "We're enough happy with this achievement, we will stay scale up and upgrade features," said Jume.

Since the beginning, it has a mission to help consumers buy and sell or invest in property instantly and digitally through this platform. However, he saw that there was entry point to requests for home appraisal online. Usually, home appraisals are carried out directly offline. This assessment is based on a number of aspects, including location, building area, year of construction, to NJOP.

For the initial stage, Dataruma is still targeting the B2C segment or individuals, be it home buyers or agents, with the following model: pay per request. Next, it will introduce a monthly subscription model (subscription) for the B2B segment while strengthening home data to make it more comprehensive.

"Goal Our goal in 2021 is to continue to develop the digitization of property transactions, where we will focus on passing entry point the easiest to execute, namely Dataruma. However, it runs parallel to the development of other products. We will try to give journey to users so that later from there they can be directed to Quick Buy or Instant Sell products," he explained.

Looking for strategic partners and optimistic market

Jume admitted that his party had done pitching to several strategic investors to overcome the above capital challenges. However, considering that a number of products have not yet received the desired traction, we cannot confirm yet product value which is offered.

"We several times Chat [with investors], but not yet confirm yes. We do realistic approach first to search strategic partners who want to give capital for the acquisition of houses. Currently, we are still using internal funding. The point is, at this time we still wait and see because we are trying Improve so that our valuation is even better," said Jume.

Furthermore, Jume sees the property market will bounce back this year even though it had fallen drastically due to Covid-19 last year. Jume said there was positive growth in the landed housing segment (landed house). According to him, this was triggered by the Working From Home (WFH) trend. This means that there is a trend in housing demand, especially in decentralized areas.

"We see that there is great potential in property. Currently people are still holding back, but the property sector is predicted to reach peak growth in 2021, in particular landed house which has started since December 2020. We received information from property agents that sales of [houses] have started a lot."