Before it’s everywhere, it’s in FWDstart. Subscribe for $99 and save 17% on the first year to stay ahead.
When Huspy co-founders Jad Antoun and Ziad Nassar decided to expand beyond the UAE, they took a rather analogue approach to plotting their next move.
“We literally looked at the world map,” Nassar, the company’s deputy CEO, told FWDstart. “Literally, like, I’m not exaggerating. I put the world map in front of me.”
China was difficult for outsiders. The US, despite being the world's largest market, offered unattractive economics for Huspy's model.
"We're not a company that likes to play with small gross margin," Nassar said, going on to claim that Huspy has the highest gross margins of any proptech globally.
Latin America looked crowded, while parts of Asia were too complicated from a regulatory perspective.
Europe, bastion of red tape and economic malaise that it is, kept surviving the cuts.
🔓 The full version of this article is for paid subscribers only.
What Huspy saw was an enormous, fragmented property industry dominated by traditional intermediaries, with limited technology and little concentration of market share. And it reckoned it had a formula for taking advantage.
The Dubai-founded proptech has since developed a remarkably lean playbook for international expansion, deploying three-person teams to launch its real estate operations in new cities, supported by a globally configurable tech platform.
On the mortgage side, acquisitions have offered a shortcut through lengthy regulatory approvals and bank agreements.
Backed by heavyweights like Sequoia Capital and Founders Fund, and with approximately $200 million in funding to date, Huspy says it now handles roughly a quarter of residential mortgages in the UAE.
Its operations also span Spain, Saudi Arabia and, most recently, Italy, where it acquired mortgage intermediary Integra Finance last month, alongside plans to invest $86 million in building out its offering in Il Bel Paese.
Not everyone has welcomed Huspy's arrival. In Spain, Nassar says incumbent mortgage brokers tried to impede its expansion through what he describes as anticompetitive practices.
In July, Spain's National Commission on Markets and Competition (CNMC) disclosed…
Become a paid subscriber today to enjoy unlimited access to FWDstart
To support our journalism, and unlock all of our stories and original analysis about the the MENA startup and VC ecosystem, subscribe below.
