Property purchase made easier

BUYING a home in Jamaica has typically meant chasing paperwork across banks, attorneys, and sales offices, with no clear view of where things actually stand. ALTRUHOMES, the residential arm of ARC Properties, is trying to close that gap. At Wick Hall Estate, ALTRUHOMES’ 221-unit development on 36 acres in Spanish Town, St Catherine, buyers now move through a digital platform built by Hidden Leaf Group that folds property selection, financing, documentation, and signing into one online journey.

Jamaica’s housing deficit remains above 150,000 units, a number that hasn’t moved much even with more than 41,000 units currently at varying stages in the development pipeline. Standalone homes are especially scarce, since land economics keep pushing developers toward higher-density schemes instead. St Andrew, St Ann, and St Catherine — the parish in which Wick Hall Estate sits — accounted for most of the roughly $100 billion in property sales recorded across Jamaica last year, which tells you demand for well-located, well-built homes hasn’t slowed down.

ALTRUHOMES’ digital platform lets Wick Hall Estate buyers move from property selection through financing, documentation, and signing — in one online journey. Kevaughan Mahon, principal of Hidden Leaf Group, built the platform after watching the same inefficiencies play out for years. Buyers were bouncing between sales agents, banks, and paperwork spread across systems that didn’t talk to each other, with little sense of progress at any given point.

“We had to connect property selection, customisation, financing, documents, approvals, and signing into one journey that felt effortless to the buyer,” Mahon said. The harder part, he added, wasn’t the engineering. It was getting stakeholders across the purchasing chain to agree to redesign a process that had run the same way for years.

A buyer can now discover a home on the platform, personalise it with add-ons and semi-furnishing options, start a mortgage application through integrated banking, upload the required documents, and move toward signing — all on the developer’s website. The system also flags missing documents and incomplete steps before they cause delays, so the sales team can step in early rather than scramble later. Mahon said the goal is to cut the back-and-forth between banks, attorneys, and sales offices that has stretched out closing …