Colombian End-To-End Rentals Marketplace Aptuno Expands to Mexico

Colombian end-to-end rentals marketplace business Aptuno has expanded operations to Mexico City where it is promising to connect owners with the best possible tenants in a maximum of 15 days.

Previously present in its home city of Bogota as well as Medellín, the company's expansion beyond its national borders comes less than 6 months after it successfully concluded a seed round in which it bagged $1.9 million in funding from the likes of FJ Labs.

Prospective tenants in Mexico City can now search through listings, be pre-approved within 4 hours and sign a contract all through Aptuno’s platform. The firm also markets itself as attractive for landlords as it covers rental payments and is offering free professional video and photography for their listings.

Aptuno co-foudner, Alejandro Gomez de Greiff

As Aptuno co-founder Alejandro Gomez de Greiff told Online Marketplaces, Mexico City was a logical next step for his company:

"Although Mexico City sees less average rental penetration than other Colombian cities, it has a higher GDP/capita, massive scale and is a very similar culture to Colombia. Mexico City was really the perfect candidate as our first international expansion target market."

"There are some players that are already tackling the rental transaction in Mexico but the category remains incipient still, our plan is to replicate the playbook that worked in Colombia and adapt our product and operations to the specific nuances of the Mexican market, all by focusing exclusively on rentals and empowering the incumbent base of brokers and agents."

Aptuno is part of a new generation of PropTech startups shaking up the antiquated world of real estate in Latin America. Its model is broadly similar to the likes of Brazilian unicorn Quinto Andar in that the company looks to cut through bureaucracy and barriers to rental transactions using technology. The opportunity that these companies are looking to tap into has been exciting enough to attract some big-name investors.

Where Aptuno's fellow Colombian PropTech startup La Haus, which focusses on new-build sales, has attracted a list of big-name backers including Jeff Bezos, Aptuno's list of backers is hardly anonymous itself with the two-year-old company counting the likes of Property Finder CEO Michael Lahyani, VivaReal co-founder Brian Requarth and Online Marketplaces' own Simon Baker among its investors.