Toronto-based tech startup Souqh is making big moves in Canada’s real estate space. The platform has had a steady rise in the past months, thanks to a hot real estate market coupled great product. Souqh focuses on bringing a seamless experience to a really fragmented Canadian estate market. The platform aims to simplify the entire home ownership journey – in one digital platform. We caught up with the CEO, Ahmer Rafiq to discuss the rise of Souqh in Canada’s real estate space.
What was the inspiration behind Souqh?
The experience for home buyers/owners across real estate and home services is ripe for disruption, as the current process to connect and work with these vendors is very analog and fragmented. Over the last 10 years of working with real estate and home services professionals, I continued to see a gap in the client experience working across these fragmented vendors. While technology has made advancements to improve the customer experience across several verticals, real estate and home improvement transactions have remained fairly unorganized and fragmented. We started Souqh to put an end to his age-old home ownership journey.
How does Souqh help owners and home services connect?
Homeowners can use Souqh to connect, collaborate and transact with vetted home services professionals. They can simply post their home services jobs on Souqh and our platform automatically sends the job request to vendors who meet the requirements and are able to get the job done. Homeowners can get quotes from vendors, review their complete online profile, select the vendor they want to work with, sign documents, schedule the service, pay the vendor upon job completion as well as share their ratings and reviews. We take the hassle away for your real estate services and home improvement needs.
Based on your experience, what advice have for home owners selecting the right services?
Our home is often times our largest investment, and it is essential that we find the right professionals to help us with our home services related needs. Some practices home owners can follow include speaking with multiple vendors before finalizing one, performing a thorough review of past services and projects completed, getting references from previous clients, documenting the job in some type of agreement before starting the work and getting agreement on payment terms.
Where do you see the real estate space in the next few years when it comes to innovation?
Over the last 2 years, over 200 proptech companies have been born in Canada alone – this showcases the room for innovation within the proptech industry. We will continue to see continued innovation, digitization, focus on sustainability, affordability and centralization of services to simplify this fragmented space.
What’s the traction been like with Souqh?
We have onboard 3,000+ real estate/home services professionals onto our marketplace across Ontario and also we reached the following millstones:
– Grew our marketplace traffic 25x to 25,000+ visits/month
– Over 4M social media impressions and over 1.5M users reached
– Partnered with 10 real estate boards and associations across Ontario
– Launched multiple brokerage level deals with Sotheby’s, Re/Max, P2 Realty, etc.
– Partnered with Rentals for New Comers, to connect immigrants with Realtors and assist with finding rentals across Ontario
– Accepted into The DMZ incubator program, which is the top university based tech incubator in the world
We saw the news about your latest partnership. Can you tell us more?
We are excited to partner with several leading real estate boards and associations across Ontario, such as Mississauga Real Estate Board in presenting Souqh as a member benefit. Here is a quote from Ray Dubash, CEO, MREB, which explains this partnership very well – “At MREB, our policy is ‘members first’ and we are constantly exploring tools and technology to make our members profitable and productive. I am pleased to announce that Souqh’s centralized homeownership hub is now available to all MREB members, enabling them to deliver a seamless client experience, grow their bottom line, work more efficiently with clients and partners, increase their productivity and retain long-term relationships with clients.”
How can people find out more about Souqh?
Visit souqh.ca to find out more about Souqh!
