Translator: Giulia Fani Reviewer: Michele Gianella
How many of you have ever sold a house?
Not one of the best experiences you've ever had, I guess.
in fact, according to some market research
selling a property is one of the most stressful experiences
a person gets through in her life.
like a divorce, getting a new job or the birth of a child.
And if you think about it, in fact,
there typically are three problems with property purchases.
The first one is timing: in Italy, for example,
it takes about seven months, on average, to sell a house.
And that's an average figure,
so some places in Italy get to 12 or 14 months.
The second one is the procedure:
for someone who wishes to sell a house,
the trading takes a significant investment of resources and time
countless counterparts like real estate agencies,
notaries, technicians, surveyors, ad platforms
have to be coordinated;
all documentation must be managed before going to the notary's deed;
and maybe you have to do
some regulatory compliances of your property as well
and additionally, as if that were not enough,
you must welcome in your house countless visits of strangers.
Maybe it takes 20 visits, to find the ultimate buyer.
A third reason is strain:
selling a house, for a person, generates anxiety,
basically because that person
doesn't know at what price the negotiation will close.
Maybe, initially,
a totally wrong evaluation had been made for that building,
so there were some revisions, over time,
that have generated additional stress in the seller's mind;
and then you don't know when cash will come:
by now the vast [majority] of trades
is subject to a mortgage,
so a person also has to wait
for the approval process from the buyer's bank;
or there could also be a risk
that the mortgage won't be approved for the final buyer.
When I founded Casavo, at the end of 2017,
me and the very first employees were wondering,,
why selling a house couldn't be as easy
as selling a stock on the stock exchange.
If you want, today, you can open an application on your phone
and with a simple touch, basically, you can close the transaction:
you buy or sell, a stock on the stock exchange.
Today it seems normal to us: however, it hasn't always been the case.
This is a picture, I think, of the 19th-century stock exchange
and the word "Stock Exchange" comes from Antwerp's Herberts Palace
where all merchants of Europe used to gather in the 14th century
to evaluate the goods and the stocks they traded.
It was basically a physical place, where these exchanges took place
and where every transaction was subject to evaluations, to negotiations,
coordination of all the subjects involved,
that maybe were physically remote.
And where the owner of the good or commodity
was basically subjected to the same uncertainty
that today affects the process of an individual's real estate sale.
And what happened?
It took essentially six centuries,
to enable one-touch purchases or sales, powered by smartphones.
And this is thanks, essentially, to two factors:
the first is advent of the so-called dealers,
who are not intermediaries.
Dealers are subjects, institutes
who purchase a title or an asset from a subject
and then sell it back to a third party.
And this was the first factor.
The second factor was technology.
Thanks to technology,
we managed to reduce to a split second
the time of a transaction
and minimize the costs of a transaction.
If today someone wants to buy or sell a stock exchange
they can do it at a cost that's substantially negligible
compared to the value of the security and the goods being traded.
The vision and the dream behind Casavo
is to do the same for houses in Southern Europe, starting from Italy.
We offer an alternative sales service for properties
to real estate sellers.
Basically, we immediately provide an offer to the private individual,
pledging ourselves to buy that property,
and we guarantee that within a few days or weeks
we'll get to the notary's and liquidate the entire amount of the property
After that, the seller leaves the stage, the process is over for him.
We renovate the property, more or less intensively,
and at the same time we remarket it:
we find the final buyer and we sell it again.
We are basically doing
what dealers do for securities.
And the whole thing is supported by a technological platform
which allows us on one hand, thanks to an algorithm,
to evaluate as accurately and fast as possible
the properties we are dealing with;
and to automate and minimize, on the other hand,
activities and timing connected to a sale,
from paper documentation to managing appointments,
all the way up to marketing, restructuring;
all the stages of the process.
We don't know how long it will take:
it took 600 years for the stock exchange,
so maybe it will take 30, 40, 50 years, we don't know;
however we firmly believe
that a person should have the chance to sell a house
as fast and smoothly as possible.
This requires an exercise
that's called "category design" in Business Administration.
Quite simply, it means designing a new category
within a traditional existing market.
I'll give you two simple examples you're all more or less familiar with:
if we think of the tourism industry,
therefore the hotel and hospitality industry,
Airbnb has created a completely new category,
revolutionizing what used to be the logic of the industry.
The same happened in transport mobility with the advent of Uber.
And the challenge of designing a new category
puts even more emphasis on the value of human capital
within a company in the early stages.
And specifically, it assumes two things, in terms of people.
The first is mental freshness, openness;
the second is to be completely free from those clichés
that has always characterized
that particular sector you want to upholster.
And this is only possible if you start such a project
with people who have little or no experience in that field.
Here, this was the corner of the coworking space in Milan
where in late 2017 we moved our first steps.
We were "a bunch of kids.", as traditional players called us first,
and we had the idea and the dream to revolutionize the way
residential sales are made in Italy,
even though we've never bought or sold a house on our own
And this was crucial,
it was the most satisfying thing
and probably the initial success factor for us -
and I think it still is, honestly.
Generally, there was a lot of skepticism and little understanding
from those who traditionally worked in that field.
They did not understand exactly what we were
nor the extent of the change we wanted to bring about.
Let me tell you a funny anecdote:
I've been living in Milan for ten years
but I was born and brought up in Montespertoli,
which is a small town nearby that I think everyone knows more or less.
Sometimes I come back on weekends
and on Monday morning, before going back,
me and my dad, we typically have a breakfast at a bar.
And I still remember when, about a year and a half ago,
the first articles had come out in local newspapers
and the owner said to my dad:
"Oh, congratulations!
I heard that your son has opened a real estate agency in Milan! "
And this had happened quite often:
but it is normal, because creating a new market category
generates an informational confusion in consumers' minds,
who find themselves with no benchmarks.
But what is Casavo? Is it a real estate agency?
No, we are not broker:
we cooperate with a real estate agency.
Is it a real estate fund?
No, we don't collect money by funds and third parties
to invest in real estate.
Is it a builder?
No, neither.
We take used properties, and the renovation concerns, at most,
the interior redistribution of that property.
We are an "instant buyer":
this label was born in America, almost five years ago,
to describe this new market category.
Mond you, in cities like Phoenix, where the model started out initially,
one in ten properties is now sold without a visit,
or at most one physical visit to the property
So it's evaluated instantly,
and the transaction closes within a week, more or less.
And this happens for one property in ten.
It's as if you, today,
instead of seeing the billboards on the street
of major real estate agency franchises,
you didn't see anything anymore:
there's a technology platform
where every person, before selling a house,
could have an evaluation done
and then one person in ten, basically, sells it to this platform.
So you can understand well the extent of this change.
Today we realized
approximately 200 real estate transactions,
therefore the figure is higher than the one they introduced me to.
We are now at a rate of about 30, 40 acquisitions per month
and growing exponentially.
We have raised more than 50 million euros
to fund: on one hand, this important growth,
we're investing in people, technological R&D, marketing
to create this new category of consumption.
Clearly it is a business model which requires a lot of capital
for the purchase and renovation of the properties we deal with,
and we're down to about 60 people.
Now, this month, about twenty people have joined
so now, in this older picture, you don't see them all.
And we've always reflected on what the trait was
that allowed us to achieve these results,
to grow so fast;
and a trait that distinguished all of us
is what we call "naive ambition":
that is, that ability to challeng the mindset
beyond what seems possible,
and not to be influenced by those people
who have always worked within fixed mental patterns;
and then taking risks, even naively,
risks that a traditional operator could clearly never afford to take
at a specific stage of development of their company.
One thing that gives me satisfaction
is to innovate together with 60 people with an average age of 26
in a country with a youth unemployment rate
it's about 33 percent,
and where it seems there is no investment,
where nothing can be done.
Here, we are definitely the finger in the eye
of those who think like this
and our story probably implies a message
for all young people who wish to embark
in an innovative entrepreneurial initiative.
And the message is: take the leap in the dark, do it well,
set no limits to your ambition, and take risks even naively.
This for you,
because it's a beautiful experience of personal and professional growth,
and because I firmly believe
that innovation is an essential element in the development of mankind.
Thank you.
(Applause)