Hong Kong-based startup company Spacious has already managed to change the city's property market, but now the tech firm is planning to expand its services in other parts of China and abroad.
Spacious, led by its founder Asif Ghafoor, has grown rapidly since it was established in 2013. The city's first home-grown property technology (proptech) company is reportedly now planning to expand into the Greater Bay Area and beyond in the coming years.
Six years after it was founded, the company's website has now become the go-to destination for property buyers and sellers in Hong Kong. As of this year, the company's online platform has around 1.7 million unique visitors. Around 80 percent of visitors to the site are sellers and buyers from Hong Kong. The site currently has around 35,000 properties for rent and 25,000 properties for sale.
According to Ghafoor, his company currently boasts around five thousand online sellers catering to thousands of buyers in Hong Kong. The company has also recently launched a simplified and traditional Chinese-language website aimed at catering to mainland customers. In its latest funding rounds, the company was able to raise around $3.5 million. Spacious aims to use those funds to fuel its planned expansion.
Ghafoor, along with its chief operating officer, James Fischer, are reportedly now busy pitching their platform to developers and agents in countries such as Australia, the United States, and the UK. The duo is also targeting other markets in Southeast Asia. The founder explained that the platform was established partly to address the growing issue of unscrupulous real estate agents and the old fashioned, and often misleading, property marketing tactics.
Ghafoor, a former Goldman Sachs software engineer, had expressed confidence in the company's expansion plans, stating that its revenues from its overseas clients have significantly increased over the past years. In 2019, a quarter of the company's revenues had come from its overseas clients, a big jump from the 5 percent in the previous year.
The idea to create the platform came to Ghafoor when he relocated from London to Hong Kong in 2008. The software engineer explained that he found the real estate websites in Hong Kong to be convoluted and none of them offered any kind of competitive advantage for sellers.
Unlike those websites, Spacious offered users a way to rate their experience with developers and agents, which is then used by the platforms' in-house algorithms to filter listings. The site also does not take any commissions from property sales. It only makes money through subscription fees that are charged to agents listing their properties on the platform.
