The growth of home purchases in Colombia has produced positive results for all the actors involved in this sector. An example of this is the Fincaraíz real estate sales and purchase platform, which in the first half of that year alone has registered 185 million searches and 7 million visits each month.
Bogotá, Medellín and Cali focused 65% of the searches and a similar percentage responds to the offer, which is 60%, indicate data from the platform.
In conversation with Forbes, Martín Monzón, CEO of Fincaraíz, said that thanks to these positive results, the company decided to invest about 2 million dollars in a brand renewal process that includes a change of image, improvement of the portal, and hiring again. human capital, among others.
“We are a company that has the same image since we launched the portal in 2006 and having grown so much and having so many users we found that our DNA of solidity, reliability, freshness, was not being so reflected in our past image”, he mentioned the CEO.
Among the main changes, as explained by Monzón, will be heat maps within the site, better performance in the mobile version of the platform and a much more intuitive portal. In addition, they plan to include a credit simulator and new lines of business. “We spent a lot of time in the last 10 months researching the ways our users are looking to offer the most effective and comprehensive tool on the market,” he added.
“Between 2020 and 2021 the real estate sector experienced important changes associated with the use of technology and the trend of using cell phones as the main real estate search platform. Today 74% of the monthly visits to the portal are through mobile phones and 69% of the contacts come from there“, revealed Monzón.
Regarding the growth of the platform, according to the CEO, this year 50 real estate clients have grown each month, that is, more than 350 new real estate companies linked to the platform. With this, the total number of allies reaches 2,700 and the goal is to close 2021 with 3,000.
A growing market
The pandemic left a series of changes in the real estate sector that will continue to be a trend. One of the most relevant confirmed by the Fincaraíz figures is that millennials are accessing more mortgage loans in the country. 39% of the loans granted in Colombia last year were for younger people with a lower default rate.
Company data show that in the first half of 2021, visits to the platform grew by 13% compared to the same period in 2020, property searches by 16%, “contacts by 12% and advertisements by 22 %. All positive figures that support its trajectory and that despite the health emergency have driven home searches online“.
“We see a lot of changes that came pre-pandemic but that the pandemic accelerated. We had not achieved what the pandemic did in a few weeks. We are increasingly seeing a movement towards the digital world and towards the cell phone especially. Sunday is the day when people connect the most to their cell phones and make more contacts per household. Last year we had a drop in metrics, but by August we already had a record of monthly contacts in August and in January 2021 we reached 7 million”, concludes the CEO. – Forbes Colombia