A UK-based startup Searchland has recently raised about €2.67 million for its housing crisis solution. The new proptech business has created a ground-breaking land-sourcing platform and is now looking to grow.
The investment round was led by Fuel Ventures.
One issue that affects both the private and public sectors is a lack of housing as our world population rises and the size of our cities keeps growing. A housing crisis is developing from the UK to Spain, with prices rising, building quality declining, and a lack of suitable housing overall.
Property companies in the UK use more than thirty data sources to evaluate a site’s development potential despite a lack of land for development. As a result, acquiring viable off-market locations is a difficult, slow, and fragmented process. Now that site and construction expenses are greater, developers also need to have more faith in their profit margins. All of this adds to the persistent issue of a shortage of new dwellings.
Aiming to solve the housing crisis is the startup Searchland, founded by Mitchell Fasanya, the co-founder and CTO of influencer marketing company FanBytes, land planner Hugh Gibbs, data scientist Arthur Goodhart, and computer scientist Archie Kennedy-Dyson. It just received new funding and is anticipated to expand.
With its cutting-edge platform, UK-based Searchland hopes to speed up the land-sourcing process and assist developers in constructing more homes.
Property developers are brought into the digital era by the proptech startup, which also provides them with a data-driven tool to automate laborious processes. It enables developers to identify and seize high-margin development opportunities before their rivals do, increasing the supply of homes on the market.
Mitchell Fasanya: “I found there was a great deal of friction in the land-sourcing process after trying to identify a location of my own to construct on. The real estate sector has a wealth of data, but it wasn’t being used to its full potential, forcing developers to sift through numerous cumbersome databases in search of the required information. Modern digital tools had been developed, but they had not been able to replace the industry’s antiquated procedures and were too expensive for most developers.
A platform that gives developers the information they require in one location has been developed by Searchland by merging the pertinent data sets. Without ever leaving the website, developers can rapidly find sites that fit certain criteria, such as the percentage of undeveloped land, use class, and building height, as well as analyze important data like planning history, ownership, and limits. The software also offers digital procedures for other administratively demanding operations, like contacting landowners to inquire about their interest in selling via sending letters of inquiry.
“Searchland has developed a compelling and highly scalable platform that is destined to become the industry standard for land sourcing because of its customer-driven approach and pace of innovation,” says Mark Pearson, founder, and managing partner at Fuel Ventures. The squad left a lasting impression on us, and we were eager to start the current round off strong.
Since its founding in 2020, the business has gained a lot of traction and signed on clients like Places for People, Galliford Try, and Aster Group.
With the help of the additional funding, Searchland will be able to quickly find, validate, and buy off-market sites for development by incorporating more datasets and further automating land-sourcing procedures.
Mitchell Fasanya: “We have a conversion rate of 70–80% and have constructed the most advanced platform for land sourcing in less than a year. In the end, we aim to relieve developers of all the labor-intensive administrative duties so they can concentrate on what they do best—build homes. We will be able to speed up product development and move ahead of the competition thanks to this funding round.
Image Credit: Searchland
