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LuxuryProperty Founder Jason Hayes has worked at the cusp of real estate and digital marketing for 35 years and built three successful ventures. All of them are bootstrapped, organically grown, capital efficient businesses.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background?

Jason Hayes: I’m speaking to you from Dubai. I was born in the UK, brought up in Sri Lanka, and I’ve spent time living and working in the Barbardos and California. I’ve been in Dubai for nearly eight years now. I consider myself a global citizen.

Sramana Mitra: What is your educational background?

Jason Hayes: I was a university delinquent. I read philosophy and politics at university. I was a keen Rugby player while at university. I had no genuine idea about what I wanted to do at university. I had that in-built belief that I would be fine no matter what it was.

Sramana Mitra: This was in the UK?

Jason Hayes: Yes. I read philosophy and politics at the University of Teesside. It was a vocational education, but I learned more about myself and life in those four years.

Sramana Mitra: Take us through what kind of career path did you pursue to lead up to this venture.

Jason Hayes: I got into Student Accommodation. I made my first fortune in student accommodation. I recognized that there’s an enormous gap in the market for good quality undergraduate housing. I gently started buying student housing and renting it to friends. I recognized that there was a great opportunity to make money in that sector.

My take on it was different. I gave them a very traditional real estate investment methodology. In 1995, I built my first website. Back then, the internet was full of university students. They had lab access to the internet. I would be renting them student accommodation over the internet. That was my first foray into PropTech so to speak coupled with real estate development. It was a fusion of both disciplines.

I sold the business in 2007. At that time, I’d become one of the largest privately-owned student accommodation providers in the UK. It was a business built on an awful lot of hard work. I just got lucky. If I had known what was going to happen in 2008, I would have sold it earlier. My timing was impeccable. I sold that in October 2007.

Sramana Mitra: Was this a bootstrapped venture?

Jason Hayes: It was very much bootstrapped. To be very honest, the funding environment was very different to the funding environment at the moment. It was much easier to get interest-only lending. It was much easier to get much higher rates of return. Student accommodation, then, wasn’t seen as an asset class. I was at the start of my journey.

I was telling these large banks that student accommodation is an up-and-coming asset class. It’s something that they should get involved with. I got lucky with an organization who saw my vision. They supported me through that. That was my first big break.

Sramana Mitra: They invested in your company?

Jason Hayes: They didn’t invest. They provided debt financing. They provided a line of credit. From there, I did a lot of work with KPMG and Bank of Scotland who took me to the next level.

Sramana Mitra: The whole thing was debt-financed?

Jason Hayes: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: If you’re buying real estate, you can do that.

Jason Hayes: I had two distinct disciplines. On the one side, the tech. That was completely bootstrapped. It was difficult to monetize. The fusion with my real estate activity was such that all of the techs that we were developing and using was helping the real estate company.

Sramana Mitra: You were basically renting housing to students using the technology portal.

Jason Hayes: We were clubeasy.com. I didn’t particularly like the brand, but the students loved it. We had about 5,000 student bed spaces that we owned ourselves and leased. We were very much at the forefront of what’s become an industry. It started with one little property with one bank manager with me begging him to provide me with a term note that would work. From there, it grew organically. That’s very much my approach – grow things organically. Let it naturally scale.

Our conversation continues here.