Startup Rever has a goal to boost Vietnam's real estate brokerage sector

Meaning "dream" in French, the startup Rever is taking on Vietnam's real estate brokerage industry

Based in Ho Chi Minh City, Rever emerged as a promising proptech firm recently. It secured US$2.3 million in funding earlier this month from Singapore’s Golden Equator Capital and Korea Investment Partners on top of a US$4 million investment from VinaCapital Ventures in June.

Investors remain optimistic that Rever’s online-and-offline business model can succeed in the fragmented Vietnamese market, just as the decacorn Lianjia did in China. “We are not aiming to be super innovative or to change the world,” said Rever Co-Founder and Chief Financial Officer Phan Nhat Minh. “We just see a gap in the real estate brokerage industry and how players in other countries have tried to fill that gap.”

Trust issues in real estate brokerage

Minh, who previously worked as a strategy manager for Grab and a consultant for Ernst & Young, was part of a team of experienced Vietnamese tech entrepreneurs joining Rever when it was founded in 2016 by Manh Phan, a former Marketing Head of Zalo, Vietnam’s popular homegrown messaging and social platform.

The country’s real estate market is often riddled with scams. Trust in real estate brokers is generally low in Vietnam, and people are often bombarded with spam messages and calls from agents. News reports about real estate scams often mention land fever as the consequence of brokers releasing false information. Only 10% to 12% of roughly 300,000 real estate brokers in Vietnam have gone through some kind of relevant training, according to local newspapers citing statistics from Vietnam Real Estate Association.

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