Real Estate firm Casafari successfully raises $15M to allow PE to buy single-family homes

Real estate tech firm Casafari is adapting Spotify’s strategy to use PE backing for single-family homes.

Casafari is a real estate data platform founded by Mila Suharev, Nils Henning, and Mitya Moskalchuk in 2018. The startup is taking advantage of Europe’s developing real estate data to aggregate, verify and distribute real estate data via its platform, due to the absence of a unified Multiple Listings Service (MLS). It plans to hunt down single-family homes and make them appealing to institutional investors.

“CASAFARI has built a unique ecosystem, which connects brokers, developers, asset managers, and investors and enables sourcing, valuation, underwriting and deal collaboration on single units in all asset classes,” CEO Nils Henning told TechCrunch. “We are very excited to represent important institutional clients like Stoneweg and others, in deploying their capital into fragmented acquisitions at scale, bringing more liquidity to the market and generating more transactions to the broker clients of our platform.”

The Lisbon, Portugal-based startup successfully raised $15 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Prudence Holdings in New York. Casafari also said it secured a $120 million “mandate” from private equity investors Stoneweg, in Geneva, and other PE players. The cash will be used to buy-to-let residential and commercial real estate in Portugal, Spain, France, and Italy, according to TechCrunch.

Other investors in the startup include Armilar Venture Partners, a Portuguese VC; HJM Holdings; 1Sharpe, founders of Roofstock; FJ Labs, founder of OLX Group; and existing investor Lakestar.

Since its launch in 2018, Casafari has been used by many private investors including Sotheby’s International Realty, Coldwell Banker, Savills, RE/MAX franchises, Keller Williams Fine & Country, Engel & Voelkers, as well as institutional investors and developers like Kronos, Vanguard, Vic Properties, and Stoneweg.

“There are currently around 70 billion euros in dry powder in Europe that could be allocated in acquiring residential property in a buy-to-let strategy, and basically there’s no offer available,” Mila Suharev, Casafari’s Co-CEO and CPO. He added that all property will be collected in portfolios that consist of single units pension funds, as well as private-equity real estate funds, as it is in the United States.

Casafari’s approach is similar to US-based Roofstock, an online platform for investing in leased single-family rental homes. Since its launch Roofstock has raised $132.3 million, suggesting that this type of investment is profitable.