The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and La Haus, the leading proptech company in Spanish-speaking Latin America, announced their agreement to develop joint research that analyzes the challenges and possible solutions to housing issues in Mexico and Colombia. Reliable data and information about the housing market in Latin America — where 100 million people live in informal housing — is extremely difficult to find. Most countries do not store housing data in the public record, and until recently the real estate industry was fragmented and often informal, with no one entity storing reliable data. However, La Haus has been collecting data on thousands of transactions across 11 cities in Mexico and Colombia for the past four years. MIT will rely on this data to analyze these countries’ housing markets in a way that hasn’t previously been possible. MIT and La Haus hope the resulting research will shed new light onto issues like housing quality in Latin America’s massive urban environments. The research will provide a foundation of information to help governments and public servants make informed decisions about zoning regulation, urban planning, and other housing issues.
The Urban Economics Lab at MIT focuses on studying economic activity and economic trends in cities. The Lab uses analytical models and big data to understand what makes cities thrive or decline, how housing values are formed and oscillate, and how local politics and social phenomena manifest in the context of increasing global urbanization. La Haus is transforming the real estate industry in Latin America through technology, data and world-class service, bringing consumers an end-to-end marketplace that eliminates many of the roadblocks that home buyers and sellers face in Latin America. La Haus makes homeownership more accessible in Latin America, where lack of access to transparent information impedes the ability to buy homes.