EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Fausto Maglia, VP of Marketing, Casavo

We had the pleasure of interviewing Fausto Maglia, Vice President of Marketing from Casavo, during the Property Portal Watch Madrid 2018 Conference.

Milan-based Casavo is an i-Buyer in Southern Europe, acting as a tech-enabled market maker in the residential Real Estate market.

“We launched our company in October of 2017 with the idea to give people control over one of the biggest steps they can take in their lives, the sale/purchase of a house, which is usually the biggest investment they will make during the span of a lifetime. We are the first in Italy to do so,” said Maglia.

“At the moment the process is quite tricky to sell a house in Italy because it takes around six to seven months to complete the sale.

“At the moment a buyer needs to deal with a real estate agency, to complete the process, and our sellers are able to sell their house(s) in 30 days, receiving the full amount we agreed at the beginning of the process, plus everything is transparent.

“They don't have to take care of anything since we control the document part and everything else,” added Maglia.

Maglia further explained the process of purchasing and/or selling of a home via the Casavo property portal, “We purchase the house. We give all the liquidity. So, it's on us and then we find a new buyer. The former seller is extracted from the process.”

When asked how Casavo came to be, Maglia elaborated, “Our CEO, came up with the concept. Having already seen this in the U.S. market, he thought that Italy would be the best place to implement this kind of business model.

“Italy, Spain, Portugal, southern Europe in general, has probably the best conditions. There is a very large private market in Italy, around 80 percent of their residential properties are owned by private owners while like in Germany and the U.K. it is more around 40-50 percent. The market size is impressive.

“There is a very long average time to sell property, and it is not transparent. The difference between the asking price and the actual selling price usually is around 12 percent. It's a jungle out there, and someone who can assist sellers in this process is really needed.”

We asked Maglia what he saw as Casavo’s biggest challenge in the property portal world. He addressed two different challenges, “One is on the customer side, and the other is on the business side of the customer. We must build trust because we are not using a standard process to sell a house. In the end it is exactly the same for the seller, but something changes on the legal part.”

“Sometimes real estate agencies who we partner with and private sellers don't really understand what we do, and they don't trust us. It is the biggest investment they've made in their lives, so understandably, they're very careful with it. So, we are working on trust now.

“Second thing is, the fact that this kind of business model is very capital intensive. We are constantly fundraising because we need credit lines to buy properties.”

Maglia also added that Casavo has recently launched a new service in Italy, “It is the first online real-time evaluation tool for real estate properties. Although there are others which are similar, our tool is the only one which considers contextual factors such as the noise that might be around the property, due to a high traffic road nearby, or the distance from public transportation, among other factors. However, an on-site inspection is still needed, of course.”

The Property Portal Watch Madrid 2018 Conference was Casavo’s first, Maglia was a featured speaker.  “It is our first time here. None of us ever worked in the real estate industry, so it's all new for us. We made the decision to come to the Conference, because we wanted to really disrupt the industry in Italy. Now we must catch up with all the knowledge that the speakers here already have, and I already gained very good insights from the U.S. market.”

Join us in Bangkok the 19th to the 21st of March for the Property Portal Watch Conference.