House hunt made easy by HouseinCity

Few years back most of the stories we wrote was eCommerce ventures and now we see a similar trend happening with real estate. There are already many in the market like CommonFloor, Housing.co.in and Prop Tiger among others, there are many news ones also coming up in the space. A new startup on the real estate block is HouseinCity.com, which works as a platform where builders can list their projects and manage the listings and update periodically.

Arun Chaudhary & Lalit Kumar have co-founded HouseinCity. Arun says whenever his friends or office mates sat together the discussion inevitably shifted to booking a home in a new project or investment options in real estate, but they couldn’t find a single authoritative source for such information. That’s where Arun saw a potential business idea and HouseinCity came into existence. Currently they are a team of four who look after the affairs of this bootstrapped venture.

Arun says HouseinCity is different from other real estate websites, as others rely on an advertisement model and therefore suffer from spam and stale data issues making it nearly impossible to get accurate information. Therefore in order to fill this gap, HouseinCity has done away with the advertisement model and have opted for a marketplace like model where they can list projects, and even the brokers can get themselves listed as sellers. Builders and brokers cannot post any advertisements on HouseinCity, but instead have to get themselves listed as sellers. "In the near future we would be charging brokers to list them as sellers for a project, that way users would be able to contact multiple sellers and negotiate a better bargain, and also this would prevent typical spam," explains Arun.

As they operate on a shoestring budget and are trying to grow organically, their efforts on the marketing front, Arun admits is lagging. Nevertheless with their current efforts, Arun claims they have about a 1,000 daily visitors and 6000-7000 projects are visited daily on the site.

Arun says he has a knack of being able to spot faults in existing products like the broker fee and the extra third man or the difficulty in navigating through the existing real estate sites etc. and now with HouseinCIty he says he is in a better position to fix issues that customers face on other real estate portals and address them through his site. And to help visitors on their site explore listings on the website, the startup has opted for openstreetmaps instead of the popular Google maps