Cairo: Saudi Arabia’s Monges has joined the real estate technology sector after taking a step that changed the company’s mission and opened doors to new opportunities.

Founded in 2017, Munjz first started as a platform for homeowners to connect with certified home service providers, but by the end of 2021, the company took a pivotal step after the founder realized that the property management sector has a huge opportunity as it is worth more than $1.8 trillion globally. .

In an exclusive interview with Arab News, Abdullah Al-Duaij, CEO and founder of Munjz, said, “We pivoted our business model to be in the business-to-business sector and categorized our company as a proptech company as we saw that about $25 billion invested in the global proptech industry, which is about 27 percent of global financing in 2021. Our vision is to digitize vertical industry business by providing software and services at the same time.”

Taking advantage of the new trend, he decided to create a property management system software while integrating the home services platform to offer the best of both worlds.

The company provides a property management system for community managers to run everything from financial to operational functions through the software. In addition, managers can also access the market for service providers such as house cleaning, maintenance, and material supply, which can be used to run the business better.

Residents can also access the white-label home services marketplace under Munjz to cater to its direct-to-consumer sector.

“We have three different categories of clients,” explained El Dayeg, “in condominiums, I’m talking about complexes, real estate, developers, community associations, hospitality, and property managers.”

As for the second part, it is commercial, where we target retailers, offices, food and beverages, warehouses, healthcare centers, and educational centers. The third segment is the service companies present in our market, we are talking about professional services, cleaning services, hospitality services and logistics.

With its new customer segmentation hub, Munjz has been able to open scope for more revenue streams to support the business.

“We have three main sources of revenue,” he explained. “First to market, from our service providers. We get a commission base from every service closed.”
“The second revenue stream is the subscription fee for accessing the platform and the third revenue stream is from the end user requesting a service from the property manager,” he continued, explaining that the third revenue stream is white company services that are provided to property managers to cover residential requests.

With the company switching to its new model just seven months ago, Al Duaij expects to achieve profitability within 18 to 24 months through expansion plans in the aforementioned sectors.

We operate in 15 cities in the Kingdom. By the first quarter of next year, we will be expanding into Egypt and Abu Dhabi. Our transformation will be more suitable for us to expand globally because we are now focusing on our software as a service solution,” Al-Duaij said.

He added that the company will focus solely on PMS software in its expansion plans for its convenience.

“Within the Kingdom, we are strong enough in terms of the market because we have already built this network over the past five years. So, we have more than 3,500 service providers working with us, and all of these are now available to our B2B customers.

As the company expands, El Dayeg stated that Monges will go through a shortlist selection process for its service providers to deliver better experiences to its customers.

Al-Duaij added that the company currently has 79 commercial accounts that include “Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonald’s, DHL and one of the largest development companies in Saudi Arabia called Al-Majidiyah, which has more than 20,000 units under its umbrella.”

Moreover, he mentioned that the company is expected to reach 300 business customers by the end of this year.

Last month, Munjz raised $5 million in a Series A funding round led by undisclosed investors with participation from Vision Ventures, Almajdiah Investment Co, and Watheeq Proptech Fund.

Al-Duaij explained that the company will use its funding to develop products and technology, in addition to structuring the project.

“Because our customers are different, it means the company is different. Therefore, the structure and team members must be taken into consideration to nurture the talents that can run this new strategy. The investment will mainly be in structuring the team members and taking care of the talents and engineers,” he said.

Munjz currently has 50 employees and will reach 85 employees by the end of this year.

Al-Dayej concluded by saying that the Saudi real estate management sector will grow significantly in the coming years, reaching a value of $23 billion in 2021 and is expected to reach $35 billion by 2028.