Why QED invested in Pashouses

In Indonesia, the most reliable way to sell a house is to paste a signage “DIJUAL” (meaning “FOR-SALE”) at the house gate.

The seller sets the house price after consulting with neighbours and family members, works with agents that are referred via word-of-mouth, and hopes that the bank will approve a potential buyer’s mortgage application. This results in a long process - 12 months on average to sell the house in Indonesia.

This problem piqued our curiosity in January 2021 when a QED portfolio company, Loft in Brazil, introduced Pashouses’ cofounders Junghans and Bin to us. They had started their careers together at McKinsey and graduated with MBAs at Harvard and INSEAD. They brought together a unique combination of deep real estate, consumer, and technology experiences.

Indonesia has a $1 trillion housing market, but housing ownership continues to be low. In its capital city Jakarta, for example, only half the people own a home.

We expect that as incomes increase and the population gets older, the aspiration and demand for house ownership will continue to grow. In fact, a recent survey by leading investment apps indicated that the main reason for investing is to save a deposit to buy a house.

We were drawn to Junghans and Bin’s vision of a transactional marketplace for real estate, leveraging proprietary data and technology to make the process of buying and selling houses reliable, efficient, and trustworthy. Pashouses can replace painful and opaque processes with an end-to-end experience that not only ensures an orderly transaction at a fair price but also integrates solutions for everything else a client may need, ranging from mortgages to renovations and beyond.

This is just the beginning – more transactions creates a virtuous cycle of transparency and fairness between sellers and buyers.

I visited Jakarta this summer and while going around the city with Junghans, saw the “DIJUAL” signs everywhere. I saw some of the houses on offer from Pashouses, and I could appreciate the day-and-night difference that Pashouses was making.

I am delighted to commence our journey together formally. I hope to contribute QED’s global expertise in scaling fintech solutions and building property technology companies to help Junghans and Bin transform house transactions in Indonesia.

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