Poplar Homes is a property technology firm based in the United States that provides full-stack technology to property owners and renters to streamline the complete renting process.
In June 2016, it built a sales office in Davao City, which also acts as the company's Philippine headquarters, with a team that included operations, market development, engineering, marketing, and communications.
In an interview, Rico Mok, Poplar Homes' chief technology officer and co-founder, stated that the company employs 40 individuals in engineering and roughly 250 people overall.
According to Mok, the engineering team alone is aiming to double its size in the next quarter.
After collecting $53 million in Series B funding (the second round of funding for a firm that has progressed beyond the original startup stage) and increasing its breadth of services, the company is on the search for new local talent to expand its Philippine workforce.
Mok stated that the organization is accepting young graduates as well as professionals with 10 to 15 years of industry experience, regardless of age.
“Our engineering team is based here in Davao City, we have a team of about 40 people engineers-being web developers, people who create the products and it’s a true testament of what the team can do. Ultimately, our investors have invested in the talents that we have and also the products that we created all of which came from Davao City,” he said.
Mok said he was impressed with the diverse talents and potentials of Dabawenyos the reason why the company opened an office in Davao City. According to him, their Davao team is better in some sense than their team in Silicon Valley.
“In Silicon Valley, we need talents from customer service to engineering talents. We started our team here with customer service first and as we developed the team we found out that the talents here are very diverse, not just concentrated on voice or non-voice. And I came to know a couple of developers meaning engineers, computer engineers and you know they were very impressive and I see that they are better in some sense than our team in Silicon Valley, so we decided to create our team here as well,” he said.
Formerly called One Rent, the company rebranded to Poplar Homes in 2021 to reflect its vision to be the lifetime partner of homeowners and residents in real estate.
“As a company, we started as Silicon Valley in the US and we started an office here about five years ago and our office has been going year after year and today we are very proud to have a full-fledged office and a team here that spans across everything from engineering, web development, to sales, customer service, operation-anything you can come we have a big representation here,” Mok said.
The company is positioned to build partnerships with its customers by providing the most accessible full-service in real estate from renting to buying.
“Our team is growing up that our team here is developing fresh products that we haven’t developed and what you see today again is about 95 percent developed here. We can service thousands of customers and hundreds of millions of renters looking for assistance and our development team here gave investors more confidence for them to invest in Davao City,” Mok said.
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