Leasing is limited in Latin America. Most landlords require three months’ rent as a deposit and a guarantor who owns a property in the same city to co-sign the lease. Santiago Morales, co-founder and CEO of proptech MoradaUno, said this dynamic leaves 40% of prospective tenants ineligible. His company wants to get more tenants to rent by taking on the risk.
“This is the biggest problem in the industry today,” Morales told TechCrunch. “People can’t rent where they want to, or they have to rent with a roommate or a roommate, or they basically can’t rent. So we said let’s go fix it. “Let’s go solve that problem.”
The result was MoradaUno, a Mexico City-based company that proactively identifies tenant risks for landlords. The company works with real estate agents to screen and acquire potential tenants and agrees to pay rent if the tenant stops paying rent. Morales said the company’s thorough screening process, which includes background checks and income verification, weeds out many bad actors from the start. MoradaUno also offers additional optional brokerage services such as legal and home insurance.
Morales said that due to the fragmented nature of Mexico’s rental market, the company decided to target brokers rather than landlords. Unlike American cities, where there is a high concentration of large landlords managing numerous units, the opposite is true in Mexico. Most landlords only own one property.
“They’re all moms and dads, like 97 percent of the market is moms and dads,” Morales said. “They really depend on this income. So they say, ‘Oh, who am I lending to? ‘What happens if I don’t pay?’ There is a lack of trust there. We say we can help solve this problem or bridge the trust deficit through technology.”
MoradaUno’s founding team knows the Latin American real estate market well. Morales said he moved to Mexico in early 2020, just before the pandemic. Because he was working with proptech Loft, a Latin American marketplace for buying and selling real estate. He was supposed to help them expand domestically, but those plans fell through when COVID-19 hit.
This experience gave him a good foothold in real estate issues in Latin America and introduced him to his current co-founders, Ines Gamboa Sorensen and Diego Llano. MoradaUno was founded in 2020 and officially launched its products in 2021. MoradaUno has since worked with more than 4,500 brokers and helped close more than 20,000 leases. Santiago added that the company is processing about 1,000 leases a month and hopes to reach 3,000 leases a month by next summer.
The company raised a $5.6 million Series A round to help with that. The round was co-led by fintech-focused Flourish Ventures and Cometa, a VC firm focused on building companies that serve the Spanish-speaking population. Clocktower Ventures, Picus Capital, and Y Combinator also participated. Morales said the capital will be used to help with expansion.
The proptech startup market is growing in Latin America. There are several other startups trying to solve the leasing problem. Aptuno, based in Bogota and helps people find and apply for apartments online, has raised $7 million in venture funding. Houm is another company trying to circumvent the region’s difficult rental market by acting as a digital broker. Houm has raised more than $44 million in VC funding.
MoradaUno is currently based in four cities in Mexico, but plans to expand further by adding six more cities in the near future. Morales added that acquiring tenants is just the beginning, and that in the future he would like to be able to offer fintech services such as advance rent payments or build AI models for brokers.
“It’s really cool to be able to provide access to people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to rent,” Morales said. “Now you’re giving them a choice. That’s a very powerful and exciting thing. That kind of work energizes us every day. We’re also making the lives of thousands of real estate agents better because we have better tools and more efficient technology.”
