Bayut appoints former PayPal exec Haroon Rashid as CEO for Saudi

Bayut, one of the leading property portals of UAE that recently announced its expansion to Saudi after acquiring Rocket Internet’s Lamudi, has today announced appointment of Haroon Rashid, a former PayPal executive, as CEO of Bayut Saudi.

Haroon who joined Bayut earlier this month was serving previously based in San Francisco Bay Rea, serving PayPal as Head of Mid-Market and SMB Integrations for North America. He brings over 20 years of experience in entrepreneurship and technology leadership, according to a statement by the company.

“At PayPal, he led integration and sales engineering for the Mid-Market as well as Small and Medium Business market segments, and drove over $90M in net-new recurring revenue for PayPal’s merchant business. During his time at PayPal he was also involved in jointly managing development of PayPal’s first global payments platform. He also lead strategic engineering projects at Magento, now an Adobe company, and X.commerce, an eBay company,” said Bayut.

“His wealth of experience and leadership will be valuable in setting the right direction for Bayut’s presence in Saudi Arabia,” the company added.

Bayut that overtook Property Finder as most visited online property portal in UAE two months ago and still maintains the lead, being a new player in Saudi (in spite of acquiring Lamudi and redirecting its traffic to Bayut.sa) has a lot of catching up to do. Property Finder’s eSimSar is one of the leading property website in the Kingdom but a large number of users in Saudi still rely on regular classified websites (when they’re looking for a property to rent, buy or sell) like Haraj that receives close to 20 million visitors every month.

The company being a subsidiary of EMPG has the money (and now leadership as well) to make a name for itself in the Saudi market.

Haider Ali Khan, CEO of Bayut, commenting on appointment of the new CEO for Saudi, said, “We are excited to have Haroon onboard to lead our expansion and development in the Saudi Arabian market. Haroon 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 Haroon’s leadership and delight property seekers and owners with the best property-listing solutions.”

Haroon, speaking on this appointment, said, “I am very excited to join Bayut and lead its entry into KSA as Chief Executive Officer. Bayut has made impressive strides to revolutionize property search in the UAE, and I look forward to replicating that success in Saudi Arabia. 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.”

Haroon who has previously spent several years in Saudi in his youth holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from University of Texas.