Marrakech – CIH Bank has added a real estate search platform to its mobile application, built with the Moroccan proptech firm Yakeey. The tool lets clients look for a property and then open a financing request online, within a single digital journey.
The two partners presented the service on Friday, October 16, at a Casablanca press conference held under the theme “Time to Keys,” with Lotfi Sekkat, CEO of CIH Bank, and Karim Beqqali, founder and CEO of Yakeey.
CIH Bank, whose historical core business is real estate, framed the move as an attempt to enter the buying process earlier. Until now, the bank intervened mainly at the financing stage, once the buyer had already found a home.
Sekkat wants to change that sequence. “The bank always intervenes at the end. And we find that a shame,” he explained, asking why it should not step in sooner. He also argued that credit terms are not the only hurdle, noting that “the rate is not necessarily the most important point” when the chosen property does not fit the client’s project.
Beqqali described the conventional path in blunter terms, comparing home buying in Morocco to “an obstacle course” in which buyers chase the property on one side and the money on the other, “without ever being sure of anything.” The partnership, he explained, aims to let a client “find the right, verified property” and know in the same step that it can be financed.
A real estate space inside CIH Mobile
The partnership takes shape through a dedicated real estate space accessible from the CIH Mobile app once the client logs in.
Users can search for a property, run financing simulations, estimate a home’s value, and list a property for sale, a feature aimed at owners who sell one home to buy another. Sekkat presented the current version as a starting point the partners intend to expand.
A joint team drawn from CIH Bank and Yakeey accompanies clients from the moment they express a project until the transaction closes.
The process rests on four stages the partners labeled “Time to Find,” “Time to Yes,” “Time to Money,” and “Time to Keys,” covering the time needed to locate a property, obtain a financing decision, release the funds, and reach the home.
According to Sekkat, these timelines are tracked daily, file by file, with real estate or financing experts stepping in whenever a delay appears.
Artificial intelligence runs through the setup. CIH Bank plans to use a conversational agent that contacts interested users, with their consent, to clarify the type of home sought, the preferred location, and the budget, including outside standard advisor hours.
Yakeey, for its part, uses AI to route requests to advisors by zone and neighborhood and to summarize client exchanges. The partners are also developing automatic matching between buyer criteria and available listings, so clients receive an alert when a suitable property appears.
Over the longer term, CIH Bank envisions regular tracking of a property’s value, much like the monitoring already offered for other financial assets.
Yakeey’s verification model and the numbers behind it
Founded in March 2023, Yakeey built its platform around the reliability of listings and prices. Beqqali pointed to a market crowded with outdated ads, already-sold homes, and prices that are hard to gauge. “We wanted to replace that randomness with trust,” he explained.
The company’s listings are “verified, visited, under mandate,” and are removed once a property sells, which narrows searches to homes still available.
The platform also offers an instant estimation tool that draws on artificial intelligence and transaction data to anchor a price in recent comparable sales.
Yakeey claims more than 5,000 verified properties, a network of over 1,000 independent advisors, and an internal team of more than 130 people working in product, technology, data, and AI. Its advisors are independent entrepreneurs trained online, in the field, and at headquarters. The firm counts the CDG group and the World Bank group among its backers.
The commercial logic is explicit. CIH Bank, which has around 3 million clients, 40% to 50% of them young, wants to capture real estate projects earlier and convert more of them into credit operations, while reorienting its branches toward advice and project preparation.
To support the launch, the partners produced a program titled “Chkoun Yl9ali Dar,” running for eight weekly prime-time episodes on 2M. The first episode, which stages a competition among three agents serving a real buyer, drew close to 3.9 million viewers.
Read also: As Morocco’s Real Estate Boom Draws Foreign Buyers, Transparency Must Catch Up
