In Conversation with Abdelrahman Zohairy, CEO at Property Sorted

Every year at the Proptech and Portal Watch conference, a handful of young businesses pitch themselves in front of 300 industry players and a panel of judges. With just six minutes to present and a further four minutes for fielding questions from the panel, there's high stakes and no time to waste.

This year, an early-stage real estate portal based in Egypt, Property Sorted, beat six other startups to claim the title of Pitch Club Winner at Online Marketplaces' autumn conference in Barcelona.

We caught up with the winner, CEO Abdelrahman Zohairy, for a wide-ranging conversation after the conference to dive deeper into his business, emerging markets, his business model, the size of the prize in MENA, and what it takes to take on not one, but two unicorns...

What does Property Sorted do?

We are building a trusted real estate marketplace in the MENA region, starting in Egypt.

MENA has a big problem with the basic search experience, from fake listings and phone spam. These problems have lasted for decades, ever since the portals launched at the start of the internet age. We're using technology and AI to decrease the cost of doing this, and we're delivering 10x user experiences based on these technologies.

Where did the idea for the business come from?

The idea came from two sides of the transaction in different areas of the world: selling a property in Egypt and buying a property in London.

When I saw the differences in the availability of information and the portals and the transparency, that told us that there was something there and that we should pursue it as a business.

Can you build some context about the MENA region for us?

In the MENA region, we're talking about a billion people on the demand side. It's huge. And on the number of houses, let's take Egypt, for example, the population is 106 million. The number of houses there is around 24 million.

And the houses available online at any given time are from 200,000-300,000, and most processes are still offline.

The demand for online homebuying is sky-high and getting bigger.

Another very important thing around this region is in the last five years or so there have been multiple currency depreciations, and a volatile stock market, which has impacted trust. Therefore, for most people, real estate is the number one asset that they put money into to hedge against inflation or save for the future and their family, et cetera.

Compare this to the UK where there is a lot of money in the stock market and other reliable asset classes. It is very important to remember that most people in the MENA and MENAP regions are highly reliant on real estate as an investment asset, yet it remains very difficult for them.

Abdelrahman Zohairy on-stage at the Proptech and Portal Watch conference in Barcelona

What's the nature of your competition in the region?

We are up against five big businesses, two of which are unicorns (Dubizzle, PropertyFinder). We are also up against the marketplace segment of Facebook even though it isn't technically a portal. There are some other players but those three businesses are the central components of the competitive landscape.

What tech do you use and what are you working on at the moment?

One of the most important things we do is check the accuracy of the listing, including price, title, description and features. We are using a lot of data points and technology to make sure they all make sense and no one can post anything fake.

We're currently working on very exciting stuff with SEO and AI-generated content. We're creating a kind of end-point in the back end that takes a lot of parameters. You can tell it "I want to create a blog", and this is my user's intent, and this is my ISP, and this is where they are on their user journey.

Then, it uses LLMs and our proprietary data to create high-quality content. This will help us with programmatic SEO at a serious scale.

How do you make money?

We sell high-quality leads to agents. We're a data-first company, so we collect data points around what the customer is doing, where they landed from, where they've clicked, how much time they spent on a specific page, and what searches they have done.

This creates a profile and, depending on the engagement of that lead, we can say that this person has a high intent, a medium intent, or a low intent.

We then tier our leads and price them according to the lead's level of intent, and the location in which they're searching.

In other words, we make more money selling a high-intent lead searching in a trending area than we do on a medium-intent lead in a less popular area.

Do you take a slice of the commission?

No, we don't. We don't take the house price into account and we don't intend to go into the transaction or commission pool. We view ourselves as a Tech company and we view the agent as the trusted advisor who closes the transaction and deserves to keep their full commission. We think this is more scalable.

How do you attract supply? Are you approaching agents directly? Or scraping?

That's a great question, and it is actually both. We talk to the supply side, and they give us data directly. We also crawl the web and we try to—from all sources—collect every single possible listing out there and aggregate everything onto our platform.

We're also looking into attracting FSBO supply and maximising our coverage in the future.

All our traffic is organic and comes from online and offline conversations, from in-person conversations to Facebook, Reddit threads and SEO.

What is the size of the opportunity for investors in MENA?

Another great question. As mentioned previously, we are a massive region with a billion people, and we already have two unicorns.

I believe that there is space for another billion-dollar unicorn in MENA—if not two. This is a very substantial market.

There's another interesting thing that most people don't know about—and that is most of these countries are not even built yet!

Most developed countries are already built, but in Egypt alone, we live on less than 10% of the land. The same applies to Saudi, right? it's mostly vacant.

There is so much still to be done. Development potential, growing populations - MENA is like a video game where you have free land to build on and you watch your baby city grow into a thriving metropolis over time.

Add onto this the basic problems that have yet to be solved with search and data and transactions. This is something big, there is a massive opportunity for great things.

What's the biggest problem you want help solving today?

As a founder, I have a lot of problems!

We are currently bootstrapped and we want to grow and move faster. While it is true that no amount of money can solve all problems, some funding would be nice!

We are looking to raise funds from angels that are strategic to the industry and have a long-term vision. We want to team up with someone who understands we have a long-term plan - not a "three years and leave" collaboration.

What will it take for Property Sorted to be the next unicorn in MENA and MENAP?

A great question! The first is funding. If you are going to take on unicorns like Dubizzle Group and Property Finder, you need money to beat them. These are companies that are ready to raise $50 million and $100 million rounds, so raising capital is critical.

Talent is next. The unicorns are based in the UAE and can attract great talent from Europe. We will need a great team to take them on.

Finally, we need to be smart about where we compete. We do not want to go to war where the unicorns are strong in a certain area, we need to focus on areas that are not a strategic priority.

For us, problems around fake listings in Egypt and focusing on the demand side more (the unicorns focus on the supply side). We need to tackle MENA differently.

Talk to me about AI.

I sit in the middle between tech and business. I worked with a lot of data science years ago, so I sort of know the ins and outs of it.

And I think AI is being thrown out there as the solution a lot of times, but it's more of an enabler and cutting costs or increasing revenue.

But, it's really just a tool. And I think it's important to always remember that as of today, AI is still a tool and it's not replacing a person. For example, we can't use AI to replace the speakers at the conference, right? We need those experienced people to say all these insights and secret sauces and use their brain power.

AI helps us to do better, but it's not really a replacement. So I think that's a very important thing to remember.

What's your feeling on the industry as a whole after the PPW conference in Barcelona?

The industry operates in a very powerful niche. Real estate portals are an industry by themselves, and it is very difficult to change this industry.

I think the startups are trying to take over the market leaders in the wrong way by building new portals. It takes a ChatGPT to take on a Google, the same goes for new portal businesses. We will need a paradigm shift to change the industry at this stage.

Congratulations on your Pitch Club win. How are you feeling?

Amazing! We learned a lot and improved our pitch from what we have seen and heard here.

What goes into a great pitch?

A pitch is a gauge between storytelling and data.

In the beginning, when you're a young business with less data, you need to focus on the storytelling side, contextualising the problem and bringing emotion and the big vision into your pitch.

As you grow and access more data, you can lean into the numbers and share more business-focused themes.

The audience also matters. If they are highly educated on the problem, you can focus on the solution. But if they do not understand the problem, you need to fill in all those gaps as a priority in the first instance and spend less time on the solution.

What isn't the industry talking about that it should spend more time talking about?

We need to talk about and look much more closely at developing and emerging markets. There are so many opportunities with high-population markets in MENA and MENAP regions. We lack a lot of basic stuff that we take for granted in the UK and other mature markets like Australia.

This is something investors and the industry as a whole should be looking at.

And finally... How about a testimonial for the Proptech and Portal Watch conference?

We discovered that the bar is very high at this conference. I took notes in 90% of the talks! I've learned so much. There are brilliant speakers, very experienced people.

The conference has been very useful, I recommend the event to everyone.

We hope to be back soon because being here has given us amazing confidence in what we do. We have a strong conviction that what we are doing is much-needed, and our customers are telling us the same.

Thank you so much for all the hard work that goes into making it such a valuable experience for attendees. We will be back again next time.