Real estate platform Casafari raises $15M to allow PE to buy single-family homes at scale – TechCrunch
Only one Spotify has used VC and PE support to acquire the music industry’s assets, so now we have to rent all of our music by subscription rather than owning it for life. So a PropTech startup is planning to pursue a similar strategy for single-family homes.
Casafari, a European real estate data platform based in Lisbon, Portugal, has raised a $ 15 million Series A financing round led by Prudence Holdings in New York. But what is crucial is that it has secured a “mandate” of US $ 120 million from Geneva-based private equity investor Stoneweg, along with other PE actors, to buy and rent residential and commercial properties. The startup already has offices in Portugal, Spain, France and Italy.
Other investors are Armilar Venture Partners (the Portuguese VC behind Unicorns Outsystems and Feedzai), HJM Holdings, 1Sharpe (founder of Roofstock) and FJ Labs (Fabrice Grinda, founder of the OLX Group) as well as the existing investor Lakestar.
Casafari was founded in 2018 by Mila Suharev, Nils Henning and Mitya Moskalchuk and uses the often chaotic real estate data of Europe to achieve its goals, as there is no standardized multiple listing service (“MLS”).
Casafari plans to aggregate, verify and distribute this data through its platform in order to find single-family homes as an asset class for institutional investors.
Nils Henning, CEO, says: “CASAFARI has built a unique ecosystem that connects brokers, developers, asset managers and investors and enables the procurement, valuation, underwriting and collaboration of individual units in all asset classes. We are very pleased to represent important institutional clients like Stoneweg and others in using their capital in fragmented acquisitions on a large scale, bringing more liquidity to the market and generating more transactions for the broker clients of our platform. “
Private investors are already using the platform. Since its launch in 2018, Casafari has been supported by Sotheby’s International Realty, Coldwell Banker, RE / MAX-Franchises, Savills, Fine & Country, Engel & Voelkers, Keller Williams and major institutional investors and developers such as Stoneweg, Kronos, Vanguard and Vic. used properties.
Mila Suharev, Co-CEO and CPO of Casafari, said: “In Europe there is currently around 70 billion euros in dry powder that could, and basically is, be used to purchase residential properties as part of a buy-to-let strategy there is no offer. The property is combined in portfolios, which consist of individual units that want to build pension funds, private equity real estate funds, in Europe as well as in the USA. “
What Casafari does largely follows the playbook of what Roofstock did in the US: an online marketplace for investing in rented single-family homes. Roofstock has raised $ 132.3 million to date.