If you live in Iran, you have probably faced a lot of trouble in finding the best place to rent or buy. But things are changing with a new player in town called iHome.ir. With its massively experienced co-founders and investors, iHome is here to bring an online solution for the Iranian people looking for places to buy, sell or rent.
A Little Bit of Background
Iran As a Middle Eastern Country
Imagine you want to buy or rent a place in Iran, or even in Tehran alone. You would be among the multitude of people for whom buying or renting a place is a big deal. The process is probably going to be the biggest transaction they’ll ever undertake, and will also be one of the most stressful phases that they will go through in their lives.
Since there was no major dedicated website for real estate classifieds, you were doomed to trudge through the traditional newspaper ads as it was ostensibly the main source to find the most suitable place to buy or rent for you – but how many words can one put in a newspaper ad? Besides this, there are no photos, 360-degree or panorama pictures.
Basically, newspaper ads are a one-way channel and they can’t be interactive, so they can’t hold their ground in a rapidly digitalizing world where user interface and experience have taken the center stage.
Alternatively, you could also go to your target neighborhoods and find real estate agencies – a time-consuming and arduous task which is often quite fruitless. Another solution would be to visit general classified websites, which literally have everything under the sun but lack the technological depth and sophistication in terms of filters and information when it comes to searching for real estate.
Finally, there have been fleeting attempts at dedicated vertical real estate portals for properties on the Internet, but none of them have had any noticeable impact. Probably because successfully bringing a traditional market such as Iran’s online real estate market requires extensive experience in this industry. The culture, the market, the infrastructure, the business model and many other important factors vary wildly and may in fact be completely peculiar to Iran.
However, that’s not to say that there is no scope in this area. One of the main factors that makes online property portals important in Iran is that real estate has always been a safe and secure investment in the country. People in Iran prefer to buy a property with their savings and rent it to generate income out of it while the value of their investment would be preserved or even boosted each year as prices rise.
This is where iHome.ir comes in and has all the right ingredients to become a runaway success.
The Investors of iHome.ir
If you live in Iran, you will know for a fact that startups are not really comfortable speaking about their investors (especially foreign investors). Let alone talking about the amount of investment they have received. When we visited iHome.ir, we expected that they would tell us not to mention their investors’ origins. But our experience with this company was really different.
Not only did we have a nearly 2-hour interview with Mohammad Hossein Rafatnejad, the CEO and co-founder of the company, we also spent half an hour talking to the investors and other co-founders of iHome.ir, Gilles Blanchard and Imran Ali Khan. Maybe some of you know them already, but for those of you who aren’t familiar with them, let us give you a little bit of information.
Gilles Blanchard
Blanchard cofounded SeLoger.com (the largest real estate portal in France) in 1992, at a time when the internet was still not very widespread. Gilles is a successful international entrepreneur who has been actively working to bring the world’s real estate markets online for over 20 years now. He is no stranger in stepping into unknown territories and has extensive experience of working in emerging real estate markets including Brazil and Malaysia. He led SeLoger.com to its initial public offering (IPO) in 2006 and made headlines in 2010 when SeLoger.com was acquired by Axel Springer AG (German newspaper publisher) in a buyout for $960 million.
Gilles has an extensive working experience in a variety of real estate markets across the globe. Gilles is still investing in interesting tech ventures related to real estate as he invested in Zameen.com, the leading online property portal of Pakistan in 2012, and Bayut.com in the UAE in 2014 (we will get to that, too), and acts as both companies’ chairman.
When we asked Gilles about Iran, he was really excited to talk about the country. “When I invested in Zameen in Pakistan – and it’s far, far away from Paris – I didn’t think about the distance because the risk is bound to the team and the business, countries are just an environment. We think that one, Iran is a great country, two, Iran is a great market opportunity and three, we are quite good at the online real estate portal industry,” said Gilles.
“We want to build something big, 100% Iranian, 100% great, and something we can all be proud of.”
Imran Ali Khan
Imran Ali Khan, along with his brother Zeeshan Ali Khan, co-founded Zameen.com in 2006 in Pakistan with its 200M population. The company had a key role in changing the way online property buying and selling is done in Pakistan and set standards for other realty websites in the country. The brothers have experience in emerging markets, having also founded Bayut.com in 2008 after Zameen’s success. Right now, Zameen.com dominates Pakistan’s online real estate market by a wide margin, with over 3.5 million monthly visitors, presence in across 30 cities, offices in 11 cities across Pakistan (including Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad, Gujranwala, Faisalabad, Peshawar and Multan), and 9,000 real estate agencies that are working with them.
Zameen.com currently has a staff of over 650, led by the brothers’ experience and know-how in management, marketing, sales, strategy and many other fields in a very similar cultural environment and development to Iran. So their experience in online real estate portals is one of the most valuable key factors in launching iHome.ir in Iran.
iHome.ir
Beginning
iHome.ir launched originally in 2008 and now it has 100K users in its database. In terms of general statistics, it has 1.8M unique visitors, 2.4M visits, and more than 15.6M page views in a year. Five months ago, when iHome.ir was acquired by Gilles Blanchard, co-founder of SeLoger and Imran Ali Khan, co-founder of Zameen.com, the website was ranked 100K in the Alexa rankings, and under 5 months it had cut that down to 55K. Getting more visitors is not an easy task, especially when you have no successful online property portals in the country, compounded by the fact that there are more than 22 companies in this sector with different business models.
The story begins with a friend of Gilles who wanted to visit Iran and invited Gilles as well. So Gilles joined them to come to Iran. On the first day of the trip instead of going for sightseeing, he joined a friend in Iran to study the real estate market of the country. That friend was the owner of iHome.ir. They went to a few real estate agencies as buyers to get a taste of the market. So for the kickstart, they acquired iHome.ir.
“It didn’t take long for me to realize that there is a great market here,” said Gilles
Since the acquisition, iHome.ir has undergone a massive technological and design overhaul incorporating some of the most advanced proprietary features in the global property portal industry.
It’s the Team Not the Platform
One of the most important parts of launching a startup is the platform. There is this misunderstanding among some people that one should build everything on their own and reinvent the wheel. But what they are missing is that if you want to spend a lot of time on the development of a platform, you can lose your window to launch your startup properly.
What they are missing here is that yes, the platform is important, but the most important thing is the team and the will to run the business and figuring out every curve of sales, marketing, management, hiring, training and so on. Note that building startups in Iran is much harder if you don’t know the culture. Tools that you have at hand are limited, such as the unavailability of major social media platforms to do targeted marketing. The only thing one has is the team and their ability to come up with new solutions for the domestic market.
Monetization on the Way
The platform is free for users but real estate agencies are charged advertising fees for putting their properties online.
“Monetization is good because when you charge a client for a service, the team feels the responsibility to provide the best service for the client. Basically, when a team is generating revenue no matter how small it is, it gives them the spirit to move forward with more energy,” said Hossein
Business Model
So how is iHome.ir making money? It’s offering the real estate agencies, advertising spaces on its platform. Each real estate agency can pick a simple plan based on their needs (number of ads), they can have up to 500 ads per months on the platform. But things get really interesting when you look at their packages for the real estate agencies. This is the part that a local team in the country could grasp it really faster than any other foreign team, and this understanding of the market could actually help many foreign companies which want to enter Iran. When you get familiar with the culture in this sector you realize that the real estate agencies and agents are really old school. Even some of them still might work on paper and not with a computer. So in order to grab their attentions and make them believe that this is how it’s done now, you should put a lot of effort to get them familiar with the online world. In the packages the company offers the real estate agencies some extra services. It includes many services such as the sales team explaining the importance of having an online profile on iHome.ir platform, some branding services (even designing of their logos), featured sections such as ad space on the front page, weekly offers, featured listings and so on. With doing some of the stuff that real estate agencies can’t connect with, iHome.ir is easing their way into the online world. With the rise of startups in the past two years and the impact of the online world, people even old school ones know that they should make a transition to become online. Half of the country’s population are under 30 years old, due to the fact that the young generation being dominant and tech-savvy, everyone else is forced to go in that direction as well. And they are going in that direction; even the grandparents.
More than 95% of iHome.ir’s listing comes from the real estate agencies and the remaining 5% comes from the end users.
“We are only charging the agencies. Keep in mind that the end users can put their property on the platform only two times because that’s nearly the number of times that they might change their place,” Hossein pointed out.
Culture Is the Key
It was interesting to know how much the investors are paying attention to the culture too.
“We are not that kind of investors who would go into a market and think that we are going to use the best practices from the western world or the eastern world. Every market has its own culture, its own sensitivities and we are very conscious of that.” said Imran.
“Iran is a young market with lots of opportunities, so we’re going to focus on the areas in which we know we have strategic strengths and advantages. A market like Iran is something which we are very comfortable with in terms of its cultural sensitivities as well.”
Mentorship
In many companies, you shouldn’t expect to have mentorship quite often. “I have heard this sentence many times that ‘I don’t know how, but you should sell and they didn’t care if the company is at the stage to be able to sell that much,” said Hossein. But in iHome.ir things are being done differently. “You have the mentorship and experience from the founders and they would suggest you how you can sell, and the decision is yours to decide how to sell with respect to your own opinion. What I mean is that there is support but no interference.”
“We believe in Hossein, he is the captain of the ship. We do weekly meetings via Skype. We made mistakes early on that we didn’t want to repeat in Iran, but every market works differently so we are just sharing the best practices with Hossein. I think it’s going to be a steep learning curve for him but after one year we will be learning from him,” Imran added on the subject.
The New Version
The website went through an overhaul in terms of the frontend and backend for the new version. The new version is going to be launched in a few days at an official launch ceremony. The new website is available in Farsi and English at the moment, but would eventually be available in three other languages, including Arabic, French and Turkish, so foreigners can also check out the places that they like in their own language and currency (prices are also available in 12 currencies on the new website). Not only will the description of the properties be translated, all the other main features of the listings would be translated into these five languages for the most holistic experience possible.
With many people coming to Iran these days this might be a good place to start digging for a place to rent or buy because it would be transparent and easy to use. Even some agencies are doing their business in dollars now, and offering services in English so foreign end users can use their platform and services.
And that’s not all. On iHome.ir, users can also set alerts for a certain property with specific features and neighborhood, so they can easily find their best match as soon as it is available. The iHome.ir App is also due to be launched any day now.
The vision behind the iHome.ir team is to expand to all of the provinces of Iran as fast as possible even launching some provinces simultaneously.
“We are expanding really fast in Iran, because we believe in the market and the opportunity,” added Gilles.
The key success point of iHome.ir would be convincing most of the real estate agencies to provide them with good and complete data. At the end, content is the king, so the more information you provide for the end user the more they would use the platform. We can expect the company to expand quickly across Iran, and from the look of their two-floor office, we can say that they have room for nearly 140 people, so they might be hiring the next 90 people in the near future.
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