Real estate portal makes buying easy
(CNS Business): Whether you’re looking to sell, rent, buy or have someone manage a property in the Cayman Islands, one online real estate marketplace is trying to make it a “one-stop-shop” experience. easyCayman is an online real estate marketplace dedicated to providing a resource for individuals and professionals to be able to find and share vital information about real estate, mortgages and home management in the Cayman Islands.
easyCayman is a DMS affiliated company and was created in 2013. Developer Javier Chaos, the brains behind the site, said the fabrication of easyCayman was all about creating an effortless experience when seeking quality information on all aspects of property.
“Having a website is the easy part, you just need to find a good design and spend a few hours making it user-friendly, but I was looking for something that could unify all the real estate listings,” developer Chaos explained.
Chaos told CNS Business his goal was to make easyCayman a user-friendly website that is very simple for anyone to use.
“We have found many real estate agents are jumping on board because this site gives them more exposure. We don’t charge anyone to put a listing or charge anyone to have a listing on easyCayman,” Chaos explained. “The idea of easyCayman was to have one place to help people living in Cayman or moving to Cayman lives much easier when looking for a property. Also making the real estate agent’s life much easier, having one place to go.”
DMS Senior Financial Analysts Cara Hennessy said easyCayman is transforming the way consumers make home-related decisions and connect with professionals.
“easyCayman is Cayman’s newest and fastest growing real estate website. The tagline, we would like to say, for our website is ‘browse one and done’. It’s really easy to navigate the website and really easy to use,” she explained.
With 5,000 sessions and more than 30,000 views per month, the numbers show easyCayman is a name many individuals and professionals want to be associated with.
“We have found a number of independent brokers who are extremely excited about what we do and we’ve had a number of brokers come to us and say we actually want to use easyCayman for promoting our properties,” Hennessy said.
The Senior Financial Analyst said when it comes to easyCayman, “I think we have a website that enhances the end-users experience when looking for property to buy, sell or rent. We make their experience much easier, and empower the buyers and the sellers with more information than you would find in any one place.” She added, “Our experiences have been, when you’re looking to buy or rent a property, you have to investigate multiple websites before you can collate all the information you want. So our objective was to put it all together in one place.”
Hennessy explained when a viewer scrolls through different properties on easyCayman, one can choose to look at the price of the property in US or in KYD. Also, each listing on the site shows what cable/internet providers are available to use in that area.
Hennessy told CNS Business being partnered with Cayman National Bank allows viewers to apply for a mortgage directly to the bank from their website. Another helpful tool, she said, is the mortgage calculator to get a more specific quote depending on your status on the islands, including the rules and guidelines that apply when requesting a mortgage.
Hennessy said another benefit of easyCayman is the information that they provide for the realtors through their monthly reports. These reports show the number of properties on the market, the number of views each property had on the site and more throughout the month.
When it comes to strict guidelines or commission rates she explained, “We don’t restrict based on where you are on commissions and we have no authority and no interest in limiting commissions. We wanted to open it up to individuals who would like the opportunity to sell by themselves and to open up the market to let there be less control in a way so you have options.”
Hennessy and easyCayman creator Javier Chaos told CNS Business that when the time is right, they are ready to roll out easyCayman in other Caribbean countries.
“Compared to what’s out there right now in Cayman, we are pretty confident that we have the best informed site for the end-user or purveyor of property,” Hennessy said.
Category: Featured, Local Business, Real Estate, Video
