Lamudi wants to be a property website you can trust – by listing licensed brokers only

If you’re looking to buy a house and don’t know any sellers or brokers, where do you go first? You can try sift through the general classifieds – page by page – for prospects, go door-to-door in areas you’d like to live in, and visit project launches or showrooms of real estate developers. Or you can look the most convenient way: online.

But while researching online saves you time (you don’t have to commute or drive around), it can be tedious. How do you scour a universe of content to find the best deal? And in the Philippines, where online scams are common, how can you be sure your transaction is safe?

That’s where real estate listing websites like Lamudi Philippines come in. Rather than visiting 10 or 20 different broker sites, these listing sites allow homebuyers to find every single property for sale or rent in the country in one place. The listings offer you vital information on the properties such as type (house and lot, condominium, apartment), price, as well as photos so you’d have an idea of what the properties look like.

Unlike many listing sites however, for Lamudi, “legitimacy” is top priority. It’s the core of their operations. “Lamudi is the only site that strictly only works with Philippine Regulatory Commission-licensed brokers. Consumers can be sure that they can trust our brokers,” founder Jacqueline van den Ende tells Tech in Asia.

Lamudi Philippines founder Jacqueline van den Ende

How Lamudi started in the Philippines

Van den Ende herself knows the value of listing sites like Lamudi for home hunters. In the Netherlands, where she was based before moving to the Philippines to set up the company, she had experienced first hand how incredibly convenient it was to browse any kind of property across the country from behind her computer screen.

“I spent day and night browsing Funda, the online real estate platform of the Netherlands. Photos, floor plans, descriptions were all in one place and saved me a lot of time going to trips because, from the internet, I could already make a good assessment whether I like the property or not,” she recalls.

So when she got the invitation from German startup incubator Rocket Internet to found Lamudi in the Philippines in 2013, she didn’t think twice. She says she knew having such a platform would be indispensable and one of the biggest innovations possible for any country.

Besides, she missed being an entrepreneur. She once co-founded a strategy consulting firm, then took a break from being a businesswoman. She worked for three years at HAL Investments, one of the largest privately owned equity funds in the Netherlands.

She was so determined to found or join a startup again in 2013 that she changed the login password of her laptop to “Startup2013” to remind herself of her dream every day. She got that opportunity when the offer from Rocket Internet came. Never mind that she had to quit her job and move to a totally different country. “I figured that if anything, it would be a good adventure and learning experience.”

“If you don’t have a go, you will never know. It is the most elementary truth I know and has all throughout my life inspired me to take chances and jump into the unknown,” she says.