houza Adds Valuation Tool to Put Sellers in Contact with UAE Agents

December 14, 2020
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Recently launched Emirati property portal houza.com has announced the release of its new agent matching tool to put property owners in contact with its agent customers to carry out valuations. Similar in scope to the agent matching tool set to be launched by UK startup portal Boomin, houza's new functionality asks potential vendors or landlords to input their neighbourhood before presenting a list of agents in the area ready to give a valuation with those agents on higher-tier plans automatically pre-marked on the subsequent form to be filled in with the vendor contacts details.

The tool is reportedly the first of its kind in the region with a houza's press release keen to stress the centrality of the portal's agent customers in the reasoning for the tool's development. As Barry Judge, CEO of houza, explains:

“At houza, we put homeowners in touch with local experts to give them a quick and reliable market appraisal on the value of their property. These experts have their finger on the pulse when it comes to knowing recent sale prices, having sold properties there themselves and working exclusively in the area."
Most property portals have some sort of valuation section nowadays either through some form of data-driven algorithm housed in a section on the website (think Zestimates) or, as is increasingly common, through tools such as houza's whereby users input minimal information and the valuation is put in the hands of agent customers.
As a property portal launched by former Dubbizle boss Judge with the backing of some of the UAE's most powerful agencies to provide effective competition to the PropertyFinder and Bayut/Dubbizle dominance, a move to provide their agents with more business rather than a data-based house price estimation tool was always the likely route for houza.

 

December 14, 2020
Since March 2020 Edmund's job has been to read about, write about, collect data on, analyse and generally know about real estate marketplaces and the companies that run them. Before that he worked at the aggregator Mitula Group (which became Lifull Connect) for five years.

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