Real estate: Lamudi raises $18 million for property investments

Portal will use funds to boost operations in Asia and Latin America.


Our Correspondent February 10, 2015
The real estate portal gets highest traffic from Karachi while Lahore and Islamabad come on second and third positions. DESIGN: CREATIVE COMMON

KARACHI: In an effort to expand its operations in emerging markets, Lamudi has raised $18 million for new investments provided by the Asia Pacific Internet Group, Holtzbrinck Ventures and Tengelmann Ventures.

This will help the company expand operations in Asia and Latin America including Pakistan. The company received the multi-million dollar investment after merging its business in two regions to form one, called Lamudi Global.



“Since the creation of Lamudi Foundation, our primary goal has been to build the biggest real estate platform in Pakistan,” said Lamudi.pk Country Director Pakistan Saad Arshed.

He said the needs and insights of house-hunters should not be undermined because of the growing usage of internet and the launch of 3G and 4G telecom services in Pakistan.

They are engaging more deeply with online sources for information and evaluations and adopting the same methods that are already commonplace in developed markets like Europe and the United States.

“It is for this reason that we believe our product has resonated so strongly with property-seekers across Pakistan,” said Arshed. “This significant injection of funds is a great vote of confidence in Lamudi.pk’s business model and speaks volumes about the booming real estate sector in the region and the demand that exists here for online property search.”

Lamudi will use the investment to improve its product on both desktop and mobile while quickly adapting to the changing trends of consumers, he added.

The real estate portal gets highest traffic from Karachi while Lahore and Islamabad come on second and third positions.

“I cannot quantify the share of the rise in property prices in the country in terms of the business we generated simply because we have seen a rise in property prices since we entered Pakistan one and a half year ago,” he said in reply to a question.

“The rising property prices in Pakistan have also helped the portal because the rise in buying and selling is fuelling its revenues,” he added.

In April last year, Lamudi received $7 million in funds from Tengelmann Ventures and other undisclosed investors to boost its Asian operations.

The company is now the leading real-estate platform in Pakistan with more than 130,000 active property listings. It has also signed more than 1,000 real estate agencies across Pakistan and has opened eight offices in major cities in the country.



The property website has also launched Android and iOS apps during 2014 to meet the growing demand for mobile property search in the emerging markets.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 11th,  2015.

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