We’re Staying

Hi, my name is Carlo. I attended high school in three different countries; then I studied international business at ITESM and, later, politics and philosophy at Monash. I spent several years abroad, trying to find and build a better life. But one thing never changed: I’m from Oaxaca.

In Australia, I served as vice president of my university’s student union and as a regional advisor for the Victorian Multicultural Commission. Eventually, I decided to return to Oaxaca to be closer to my family. Here I founded Estragital, a project that for five years has been dedicated to building better digital infrastructure for small businesses in Oaxaca: websites, sales funnels, automation, analytics, consulting, and more—the behind-the-scenes work that no one sees, but without which nothing works.

In 2024, I became a licensed real estate consultant and helped launch a Century 21 franchise from scratch. That’s where this story begins.

Building an office from the ground up forces you to take in the entire market all at once. In less than six months, we’d assembled a team of more than ten agents, signed agreements with local marketing and media companies, secured exclusive listings, and learned a great deal: how to use a CRM, what an MLS is, the value of a good reputation, and why, in the end, the most important thing is still the relationships we build with those around us.

Shortly before our first anniversary, the office decided to move its operations to another state. But the lessons we learned stayed with us. During those months, I discovered one of the most profound flaws in Oaxaca’s real estate market: the lack of reliable and easily accessible information.

The information does exist, yes, but it’s scattered: a Facebook ad here, a WhatsApp message there, a small blog over there; and if not, maybe Juana, Chana, or her sister has it. The result is prices that no one knows if they’re still current, duplicate listings with conflicting details, and, underlying it all, a question no one can answer with certainty: Is what I’m seeing actually true?

The problem isn’t unique to Oaxaca. To varying degrees and with different nuances, fragmentation, mistrust, and a lack of traceability are present in many real estate markets across Latin America and the world.

That’s why the decision to move the office made sense. Viewed objectively, it was perhaps the most sensible solution. Even so, we decided to stay here.

It wasn’t out of stubbornness. It was because a market that everyone is turning away from never gets better. And I felt I had to try to help fix it.

Together with Yas, my girlfriend, we started our own family-run agency, YR Inmobiliaria, and set to work with what we had. In the day-to-day work, I finally understood the missing piece. The problem was never a shortage of capable people, extraordinary properties, or a good quality of life. There’s plenty of all that.

What was missing were tools: tools capable of competing with the best in the world, but designed for the economic reality of a Mexican real estate agent.

That nuance changes everything. Designing an excellent platform for someone who bills in dollars is relatively easy. The hard part—and what really works for us in Mexico—is building something that also makes financial sense for the advisor who works alone or with a small group of friends and acquaintances, who closes just a few deals a year and doesn’t have an IT department behind them.

Over the past year, I’ve dedicated myself to building those tools. First for our small family-run agency: a place to store and publish our inventory; keep track of our contacts; track who entrusted us with each property and who manages it; fill out a property profile just once and share it with the click of a button; and provide a calendar where our clients could book a visit just as easily as we could send a link.

Shortly afterward, an uncomfortable realization set in. The tools had made our work possible, but we were still operating within a broken and fragmented market. And a market can’t be fixed by a single agency with just two agents. Keeping the tools to ourselves was not only selfish but also pointless: if the information and the work remained locked away in small, isolated spaces, the underlying problem would remain unchanged.

That’s why the project stopped being just ours and became Bonimmo: a platform open to anyone who wants to use it and participate in the market we want to help build.

Why Prices Are What They Are

When it came time to price these tools, we didn’t base our decision on what a platform costs in the United States or on what other companies already charge. We started with a more persistent question: How much do we need to charge to offer a quality service that a local agent can afford without thinking twice?

That’s where our pricing came from. Bonimmo offers a free option for every type of user. An agent can sign up for free, organize all their listings, and share their inventory with other verified agents within the MLS. When they need to list properties for buyers and run their business using tools like the lead funnel and calendar, they can upgrade to our Plus plan for just $499 a month. And if they’re already managing a much larger inventory, the Pro plan costs just $999 a month.

Property owners can list up to three properties at no cost and without paying a commission to Bonimmo. Our Plus plan allows you to maintain up to ten active listings and costs $249 per month, while the Pro plan costs just $449 per month and removes that limit entirely.

Property seekers can also browse, save listings, and use the basic tools for free. The $99 and $199 per month plans expand the limits and features for those who need to compare and track more options at the same time.

I’m not going to claim these are the lowest prices on the market, because I haven’t checked. But I can say something much more useful: these prices are based on our actual costs and on the financial realities of the people for whom we built Bonimmo. We want to charge enough to sustain and improve the service, without turning essential tools into a luxury that’s out of reach for local users.

What You’ll Find, Depending on Who You Are

I don’t want to promise you the same thing as everyone else, because not everyone comes to Bonimmo to do the same thing.

If you’re looking for a property, you can sign up for free and without providing more information than necessary: search, save what interests you, and compare options. At first, you might find fewer listings than on Facebook or platforms that have been on the market longer. But our commitment is to build something more useful than just a large volume of listings: every listing has a real person behind it, and as we roll out more verification and reputation-building tools, they’ll help you better understand where the information comes from and how reliable it is.

If you’re a property owner and want to list a property, you can keep up to three active listings at no cost, with no commission for Bonimmo, and without anyone forcing you to sign an exclusive listing agreement.

If you’re a real estate agent, the free plan lets you organize as many listings as you want and share them within our MLS with other verified agents or with teams or individuals you specify. When you post something on the MLS, it won’t be visible to buyers yet, but it can be shared among those working on your inventory. When you’re ready, you can upgrade to a paid plan to list on the open market and use the lead funnel, calendar, and other operational tools.

This isn’t an oversight; it’s a decision: sharing inventory among those working on it shouldn’t cost anything. What we charge for are the tools to list and manage it for the market. That’s exactly the approach that would have helped me on the very first day I sat down to take my real estate course at Century 21.

What It Means That Bonimmo Is in Beta

It means exactly that. Bonimmo works, and we use it every day, but it’s still a work in progress. There are features we want to add, areas to cover, and fewer properties than we hope to offer someday. You may also come across details that we still need to refine or correct.

I’d rather tell you this now than have you discover it later and not know what to expect. We launched early on purpose, because a marketplace is built by the people who use it, not behind closed doors. We want to know what you find useful, what surprises you, and what we can still improve.

What I’m Asking of You

Just one thing: use Bonimmo and the tools we offer, and tell us how we can improve.

We’re not looking for applause or for you to share the link just to be polite. We want you to log in, try to do what you came here to do, and let us know when something gets in your way or is missing. It could be an important feature, a hard-to-find button, or a spelling mistake. It all counts.

Thank you so much for giving us the opportunity to share this journey with you from the very beginning. After a year, sharing something that was ours alone for so long finally feels like a big deal. And it feels good.

See you inside.

Carlo Spada
Founder, Bonimmo