Serial Entrepreneur Bootstrapping Three PropTech Ventures: LuxuryProperty Founder Jason Hayes (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the Dubai business. Why Dubai?

Jason Hayes: Tax. We don’t pay tax over here. We enjoy the most incredible taxation over here. There is no income tax or capital gains tax. That was a big driver for me. I was hugely keen to go into the PropTech area. Dubai has the most enormous real estate market. It looked to be the most incredible place to do the property portal.

I came over and looked to buy a company over here. It didn’t work out. There were some contingent issues with that company. Those three months of doing the due diligence on the acquisition got me more excited. My wife thought I was crazy. She came over and liked it here. From there, that failed acquisition prompted me to do another acquisition and a complete rebrand. Thus, Luxury Property was born.

Sramana Mitra: You’re going after a different segment.

Jason Hayes: We market the world’s finest homes.

Sramana Mitra: The inventory is global?

Jason Hayes: We market $30 billion worth of real estate across 23 international markets.

Sramana Mitra: You’re just marketing them?

Jason Hayes: Right. We are not a late-stage startup with the refinement of a luxury brand. We created a global luxury brand. We market homes in Dubai, Mauritius, New York, and LA. We’ve got the most incredible digital platform. Organically, we reached three million digital users. That’s still growing.

We got a brokerage in Dubai. It’s something that I wasn’t quite too sure about. The brokerage has been enormously successful. We got a dedicated brokerage team. We’ve got over a hundred real estate brokers who work in our Dubai brokerage. We are in two distinct verticals – one being digital property marketing for homes across the world and the other being the brokerage of luxury homes.

Sramana Mitra: What is special about digital marketing? Things have changed. There are now more tools. There are all kinds of things that have come together.

Jason Hayes: It starts with the platform. We’ve created a platform that has great UI and UX. It’s light and intuitive. It’s got a keyword-rich domain. If you put property and luxury into Google, we’re going to come up very high. We sold an island in Mexico last week for $75 million.

Digital marketing is constantly changing. The algorithms around it keep changing. The behavior of people keeps changing. Being on the forefront of AI has been enormously important to us. Our mindset around the sale of luxury homes and the marketing of luxury homes is that, in many respects, it’s providing a world-class advisory. Some of that is around the hospitals, dentists, and doctors within the area.

Another aspect of it is ensuring that we’re featuring highly when people are searching. We’re developing technology on our website for voice command searches that are specific. For example, I’m looking to buy a home with three bedrooms, four garages, and a basketball court. There’s only probably a handful that have a basketball court.

Our job is to create a technology that allows you to search and find homes that meet your specific requirement. We did some focus groups recently. Some were asking for pizza ovens which I had never thought of as a search term. If you understand your client’s behavior, then you can structure your digital marketing to that.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Serial Entrepreneur Bootstrapping Three PropTech Ventures: LuxuryProperty Founder Jason Hayes
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