UAE property portal Bayut has appointed Haroon Rashid as its new chief executive officer in Saudi Arabia to lead the company’s expansion into the kingdom.

Earlier in May, Bayut announced its expansion into the Saudi market after it acquired Lamudi Middle East and its operations in key markets across the Mena region, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the UAE.

The acquisition is seen as an ideal platform for Bayut to expand its footprint in the region with the most locally-tuned solutions to market needs.

Bayut followed up the acquisition with the official launch of the Bayut.sa domain, along with ambitious plans for an eventual GCC wide expansion.  

Rashid, who recently served as PayPal’s Head of Mid-Market and SMB Integrations for North America, brings over 20+ years of experience in entrepreneurship and technology leadership.

At PayPal, he led integration and sales engineering for the Mid-Market as well as Small and Medium Business market segments, and drove over $90 million in net-new recurring revenue for PayPal’s merchant business.

He was also the co-founder of Yotascale, a leader in Autonomous Cloud Operations, where he developed the product strategy and lead business development; ultimately securing $11 million in venture capital funding for the cloud-based startup, said the statement from Bayut.

Welcoming him into the fold, CEO Haider Ali Khan said: "We are excited to have Rashid onboard to lead our expansion and development in the Saudi market. He brings many years of experience building high caliber teams, and growing businesses towards scale and efficiency."

"His leadership and commitment to excellence will help realize our long-term vision of making Bayut a leader in the Saudi Arabian market. We look forward to bringing our time-tested expertise through his leadership and delight property seekers and owners with the best property-listing solutions," he added.

Rashid is no stranger to the region having spent several years in Saudi Arabia in his youth. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin.

In his new role, he will lead Bayut’s ambition to provide support to developers, agencies and end-users, and enhance the home buying/selling and rental experience Saudi Arabia.

"Bayut has made impressive strides to revolutionise property search in the UAE, and I look forward to replicating that success in Saudi Arabia," stated Rashid.

"The real estate space in the kingdom is ripe for innovation. We’re excited to leverage our world class technology and leading expertise in the region to make a tangible difference to the user experience," he added.-TradeArabia News Service