Bezos Expeditions backed Latin American property startup, La Haus is ready to accept Bitcoin as a payment mechanism for its real estate transaction. This will add to the growing use of cryptocurrency in the region.
La Haus allows buyers to purchase property using apps, has now offered a new housing development project in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, to be paid in cryptocurrency. It wants to open its inventory of 80,000 properties to pay in Bitcoin as per Bloomberg news.
Co-founder and President of La Haus, Rodrigo Sanchez-Rios, feel that Bitcoin will be the future reserve currency and wants to pioneer real estate with this technology.
In collaboration with Los Angeles-based OpenNode, La Haus is a payment processor that allows payment over a lightning network and on-chain to make payments easily. The company, in turn, will pay the seller of the property in fiat currency. La Haus has not yet decided how much Bitcoin currency it will have on its balance sheet.
The largest cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, is known for its volatility having a market value of more than $1.2 trillion after a 20% rise to $68,000 in the last month. The growing acceptance of Bitcoin across Latin America has given legitimacy to this digital currency. El Salvador became the first country to make it legal tender and raised interest in other companies, governments, and the region.
According to Sanchez-Rios, the home buying process in emerging markets can be eased by the use of technology as it cuts down the paperwork and time needed for a traditional offline purchase.
It is not clear if La Haus is the first company to accept Bitcoin for property deals. It has hired a former presidential advisor and Colombian deputy minister, Jehudi Castro-Sierra, to spearhead this project.
La Haus was co-founded in 2017 by Sanchez -Rios along with Tomas and Jeronimo Uribe who are sons of Alvaro Uribe, former Colombia President. The company in Mexico and Colombia across ten cities with a focus on housing development. The app has more than 1 million monthly users, and transactions on the app are more than $1 billion.
La Haus has raised more than $150 million in equity and debt from investors, including Acrew Capital, a fund of Jeff Bezos, Kaszek Ventures, Renegade Partners, David Velez, and Salesforce. Inc billion founder Marc Benioff’s investment fund, TIME ventures. The company plans to raise funds again in 2022 and expand to every major city of Mexico and Colombia and later across Latin America.
