Finland’s Kodit.io announced its acquisition of Spanish startup Lucas, combining its automated home selling and buying offering with Lucas’ rent-to-own product, allowing first-time homebuyers to choose a property with only a 5% down payment.
The acquisition will take the company’s headcount to over 100 people across offices in Finland, Spain, and Poland.
Kodit.io will now offer a unique service that allows homebuyers to rent before actually buying a home. Kodit.io comes up with the remaining 95% to buy the flat and lease it back to them with an exclusive option to buy on a future date at a predetermined price.
Across Europe young home buyers are struggling to purchase their own homes due to the rapid rise in real estate prices in the housing market and banks’ increasingly tightening lending criteria for first time home buyers, many of who have not accumulated enough savings, meaning they are left with few options on how to buy a property.
“Homeownership has proven to be the largest wealth generator to reach a massive scale in the last century. However, it is almost impossible currently for first-time buyers to get into the housing ladder.”
Steven Aitkenhead, CEO and founder of Lucas.
“Lucas’s core is to provide first time home buyers with an accessible and flexible solution into buying a home, driven by technology. Through our platform, we have been able to sign up over 15,000 future homebuyers in need of our service. It quickly became evident that Kalle and I shared a very similar mission and that we should just align into a single vision to create something that can lift many peoples’ future,” Aitkenhead says.
More on Kodit.io on ArcticStartup:
BOLD VISION LEADS KODIT.IO TOWARDS EUROPEAN EXPANSION
On the cover picture: Alex Safarov, CFO at Kodit.io; Jani Nokkanen, Partner and CIO at NREP; Kalle Salmi, CEO at Kodit.io; Fanny Tabermann, Finance Director, at Kodit.io Photo: Juho Kuva
