Bayut Appoints CEO in KSA to Lead the Property Vertical’s Expansion

The UAE’s largest online property portal, Bayut.com brings on Bay Area entrepreneur and technology leader Haroon Rashid as Bayut’s Chief Executive Officer in Saudi Arabia (Bayut.sa), to lead the company’s expansion into the Kingdom.

Earlier this 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.  

Haroon, 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 $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. Haroon was also co-founder of Yotascale, a leader in Autonomous Cloud Operations, where he developed the product strategy and lead business development; ultimately securing $11M in venture capital funding for the cloud-based startup. His wealth of experience and leadership will be valuable in setting the right direction for Bayut’s presence in Saudi Arabia.  

Bayut aims to replicate its success achieved in the UAE with its entry into Saudi Arabia. The Kingdom is currently undergoing economic reforms with hopes of boosting and diversifying its economy away from oil. Bayut has been preparing an expansion into the Saudi market for some time after conducting extensive research into the needs of the real estate industry in the country. 

In his capacity as CEO of Bayut Saudi Arabia, Haroon will lead Bayut’s ambition to provide world-class support to developers, agencies and end-users, and enhance the home buying/selling and rental experience Saudi Arabia.

Haider Ali Khan, CEO of Bayut, 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.”

Speaking on his appointment, Haroon said: “I am very excited to join Bayut and lead its entry into KSA as Chief Executive Officer. Bayut has made impressive strides to revolutionise 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 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.