Colombian based iBuyer Habi has announced that it has acquired OKOL, the parent company of Mexican end-to-end brokerage and marketplace Tu Cantón as well as the challenger portal Propiedades.com.
Tu Cantón is a full-service end-to-end search and transaction platform that invites users to discover properties on its marketplace before availing themselves of a Tu Cantón agent to guide them through the process and deal with paperwork.
Propiedades.com is a traditional pay to list property portal that was founded in 2012 and has some 66 employees according to Linkedin. The portal is one of the pack challenging for market leadership in Mexico behind the likes of newly acquired QuintoAndar asset Inmuebles24, Adevinta-owned Vivanuncios and EMPG-owned Lamudi.
As for Habi, the company was founded in 2019 in Bogota and, like many PropTech companies, has since expanded to Mexico to tackle the issues facing middle-class home movers there. The company has an iBuyer model similar to those employed in the United States.
Having secured Series B funding of $100 million from the likes of Tiger Global and Softbank in June, Habi has designs on becoming “the largest consolidated prop tech in the country and we’re integrating to become the largest iBuyer in Mexico,” according to CEO and co-founder Brynne McNulty Rojas.
The purchase of OKOL will give Habi greater customer acquisition as well as allowing the company to expand operations across the country having previously only been operational in Mexico City.
Mexico and Colombia are increasingly being seen as pioneer markets for PropTech companies and not just the iBuyers. Last week, end-to-end sales specialist La Haus announced that it had transacted its first property in Bitcoin while companies like digital rentals specialist Aptuno and curated rentals company Casai have expanded across Mexico over the last 12 months.