Brazil’s Zap+ starts renting out properties without guarantors or insurance

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The country’s largest real estate market ecosystem, the Zap+ platform for selling and renting properties, is about to become even more relevant. The brand was created after OLX Brazil acquired Zap Group and is responsible for the ZAP, Viva Real, and OLX Imóveis websites.

Now the company has launched Zapway+, a tool that allows renting a property without guarantors (co-signers) or insurance (surety bonds).

This solution is possible thanks to Zap+’s reach. Together, the platform’s brands have 19.2 million active listings, more than 34 million users per month, and more than 45,000 partner real estate professionals. This allows the company to negotiate more favorable insurance terms and eliminate the need for a potential renter to have a guarantor for lease contracts.

“Because of the scale, we have a guarantee offering with very low costs, which makes the leasing process much easier. This is how we change the game, and this is just the beginning,” says Marcos Leite, general manager of Zap+.

In cases where the tenant has to pay a guarantee deposit, Zap+ says it offers a faster and more cost-effective solution. “The deposit guarantee is a bureaucratic and expensive product, it takes days to get out. We have managed to get the guarantee released or rejected only with the tenant’s CPF,” says Rafael Nader, vice president in charge of Zapway+.

However, the company has negotiated with its real estate partners to pay for the deposit insurance themselves so that the tenant is exempt from these costs. It is easier for the real estate company to provide the insurance because the terms of the contract are more advantageous. In return, it gains more customers.

“If the company announces the property without a guarantor or insurance bond, interest increases, it closes more contracts and gains volume,” Nader says.

Of the 44 real estate brokers who piloted Zapway+, 90% chose to pay the surety bond to attract more clients. “Real estate agents already tended to pay this cost, but on their own, it was more difficult. We partnered to make that process easier,” he says.

Zap+ has set its sights high with the new solution. “We can be bigger than any other player in the rental market because we already have scale,” Leite says. Zapway+ facilitates the guarantee of the lease and allows the tenant to schedule viewings, take a virtual tour, send an offer, analyze the tenant’s profile, and sign the contract – all virtually.

Using data intelligence, the tool can also identify customers who are more likely to rent a particular property and make them a better offer.

Data from real estate brokers who have already tested the service shows that customers who booked a property tour through Zapway+ had a conversion rate five times higher than those who did not use the technology. For properties advertised through Zapway+, the time to close was 35% shorter than for traditional listings.

For the future, the company is already preparing a solution to expand its activities in the market of buying and selling real estate, with solutions that facilitate transactions. One of the critical areas will be facilitating access to real estate financing.

In both rentals and sales, Zap+’s goal is to partner with the real estate brokers that use its platforms.

Zapway+ comes about a year after OLX Brasil bought Zap Group for R$2.9 billion. One of the goals announced in the transaction was to make the company more relevant to real estate agents and developers. Today, Zap+ already offers a solution that allows clients to publish their ads simultaneously on all of the group’s platforms, allowing for unified management of clients interested in the property.

With Zapway+, the company is taking an essential step in an increasingly digital and competitive market. According to a survey by Terracotta Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in the real estate sector, there are already 839 active startups dedicated to the real estate sector in the country.

These are the proptechs or constructs that focus on three areas: the real estate already in use, the path to acquiring the real estate, and the construction environment.

The accelerated growthreflects the size of the market and its potential: The number of startups in the sector increased by 235% in four years when the survey was first conducted.

One of the main objectives is to encourage Brazilians to move more frequently by removing barriers that currently prevent this, such as access to real estate financing, transaction costs, and the complexity of buying and selling.