LuxuryProperty Founder Jason Hayes has worked at the cusp of real estate and digital marketing for 35 years and built three successful ventures. All of them are bootstrapped, organically grown, and capital efficient businesses. Here is our discussion from 2023. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from?
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. LuxuryProperty Founder Jason Hayes has worked at the cusp of real estate and digital marketing for 35 years and built three successful ventures. All of them are bootstrapped, organically grown, capital efficient businesses. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are
Sramana Mitra: What you’ve built is a vertical search engine that is specific to luxury real estate. That has its own meta tags and meta data. What is the AI part of it? Jason Hayes: We do have some AI agents launching soon. We believe that we are going to be the first to do
Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the Dubai business. Why Dubai? Jason Hayes: Tax. We don’t pay tax over here. We enjoy the most incredible taxation over here. There is no income tax or capital gains tax. That was a big driver for me. I was hugely keen to go into the PropTech area. Dubai has
Sramana Mitra: One of the keys to building scalable businesses is to operate within guardrails. What you’re pointing out in deciding not to go for any kind of permit is a huge decision. It’s a smart decision. That allows you to move quickly. In the business that you did first versus this business, it’s a
Sramana Mitra: What segment were you going after? What kind of price? Jason Hayes: I started by buying homes around the $300,000 mark. I was looking to go for volume and was trying to spread the risk. Sometimes, we would buy homes that were significantly cheaper and sometimes, we would buy homes that were significantly
Sramana Mitra: When you sold the company in 2007, what were the metrics? Jason Hayes: The value of the entire portfolio was in the region of $200 million. Revenues were approximately 10% of that. There was probably about 70% loan to value. I sold it to a London hedge fund. I remained with the company
Jason has worked at the cusp of real estate and digital marketing for 35 years and built three successful ventures. All of them are bootstrapped, organically grown, capital efficient businesses. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background?