Startup Spotlight #154: Alo Home
Startup Spotlight #154: Alo Home
Alo Home partners with developers building the great homes of the future to maximize their success by accelerating direct home-to-homebuyer matches and closings.
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I got the chance to speak with Eduardo Orozco, co-founder and CEO of Alo Home, about what he’s working on at his startup, and any advice he has for emerging entrepreneurs.
Alo Home partners with developers building the great homes of the future to maximize their success. The startup accelerates direct home-to-homebuyer matches and closings. The startup believes that buying a new home should be a joyful experience and we are building the technology and ecosystem to achieve that. Alo Home currently works with real estate companies in 6 cities throughout Mexico and Colombia. The startup plans to expand to several other markets throughout Latam in the upcoming months.
Orozco was born in Mexico City. He always loved the city and the buildings that make it. He got the opportunity to study college in the US, went to Penn for a double degree in Urban Studies and Finance. He graduated during the global financial crisis, which was a very challenging time to start a career in real estate finance. Orozco started working at a family office in Dallas acquiring multifamily properties from foreclosures. Later, he was fortunate to join Greystar and ended up leading the team in Mexico and growing the company into Latam. After that, Orozco became a real estate developer doing residential projects in Mexico, where he was shocked at the lack of tools and technology to be successful, which led him to co-found Alo Home to help other developers succeed through technology.
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Startup Spotlight: Alo Home
Problem: Selling and buying new homes in presales is a huge challenge for sales teams and developers in Latin America, and everyone including the homebuyers is frustrated and needs a whole new interface and technology to achieve it.
Market: Alo Home works with real estate companies in projects of all different sizes in Mexico and Colombia. Annually there are close to 1 million new homes built and sold in Latam with an estimated market value of close to 40B and we are building the interface through with most can serve directly to customers and avoid relying on marketplaces.
Solution: Alo Home is building the tech platform through which homebuyers, sales teams, and developers can succeed at making home-to-homebuyer matches. We combine a technology platform with virtual events as well as partnerships with great products and service providers to transform the homebuying and selling experience while integrating powerful analytics and machine learning.
Team: My cofounder is Michael Meo who is a gifted product designer with an architecture background. We met at his previous startup where I helped as an advisor. We currently have an amazing 8 person team distributed in Latam.
Recent Success:
Orozco: Our team has been really successful at empowering our clients to increase the speed at which they are selling homes. All of our projects are achieving record sales within weeks of implementing our technology. Most of our projects are selling 2x monthly than they previously were. We took a technology + services approach with partners because these are complex transactions in which technology empowers a purchasing experience, but decided to integrate local partners to provide the services and create a positive ecosystem. Homebuyers are making the most important purchase in their life, and currently, the experience is mostly offline. At the same time we've provided new tools for sales teams to be able to communicate, quote, and track buyers better, faster, and with automation.
Sales teams are saving a lot of time and effort by using integrated tools with access to live inventory and pricing. For real estate developers, our platform integrates analytics, market intelligence, and pricing intelligence that they didn't have previously. At the same time, we have integrated an ecosystem of marketing agencies that can support the projects to better connect with their target audience. In combination, Alo Home has been very successful at building amazing case studies across Mexico. Our revenue model has been very supportive of our growth because we charge based on the success of new homes and condos sold, our clients love this because they know we are on their side not only as a tech company but as an ecosystem to support their sales.
Recent Struggle:
Orozco: We struggled in finding the right mix of technology plus services. When we launched we didn't know exactly what to offer beyond our core website technology, so we started offering more and more services to be able to test options that added value to our clients. In May we started growing really fast with new accounts but we hit a capacity limit and our services started suffering. We decided to do two things: bundle services and technology and offer different pricing models, and creating an ecosystem of validated partners that provide a list of services to our clients. Our operating and growth metrics have improved significantly and this has unleashed further growth.
Founder Advice:
Orozco: I truly believe that the most exciting companies in the future will come from developing countries, focused on solving old problems in legacy industries. In particular, real estate is an incredible space that needs so much technology to improve. My advice would be for entrepreneurs to test new revenue models that are aligned with their client’s goals. Technology is amazing but the combination of technology plus services is a powerful way to build moats and support a deeper connection in a B2B context. For us, that has meant leveraging a deep network of validated partners and our revenue model is commission-based, we charge per apartment sold, which has created really positive LTV/CAC metrics.
Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:
Orozco: Here are three founders you should check out next!
Maya Dadoo, Founder of Worky: Worky builds technology for businesses to manage their HR processes and records.
Diego Llano, Founder of Morada Uno: Morada Uno is creating an insurance product to increase trust in residential rent transactions in Mexico.
Gerardo Giacoman, Founder at Clara: Clara is a credit card and payments platform for businesses in Mexico.
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