Housing.com acqui-hires Plat and Big BHK to strengthen its supply side product portfolio

Housing.com today announced two acqui-hires with Plat, an online network for agents and BigBHK a property management software targeted at rental suppliers, to strengthen its supply side product portfolio. Earlier in August, Housing had acquired cloud-based CRM and ERP startup HomeBuy360 for $2M.

With these acqui-hires, Housing.com brings onboard Chitransh Sahai, Gautam Prem Jain, Ayush Lodhi and Ankit Aggarwal from Plat and Ankur Kumar and Atul Yadav from BigBHK.

Commenting on this, Rishabh Gupta, the interim CEO and COO of Housing.com stated, “The acqui-hires with Plat and BigBHK adds to our talent pool which in turn will empower our partners and consumers to better manage their property portfolio ensuring convenience and transparency. This is in line with our strategy moving forward of focusing on the core of our business."

Housing began their first step in this direction with the launch of ‘agents app’, a technology tool for realty agents across the country. The app has so far received close to 10,000 downloads on the Google Playstore in about one month.

Sector overview

The brokerage market in India is estimated to be about $4 billion and the real estate market relies on accurate and transparent information for it to function. Over the past year there have been many startups catering to different subsets of the real estate ecosystem. Less than a week ago, Broker networking platform Plabro Networks had raised funding from Flipkart founders and others to grow to 35 Tier 1 cities over the next ten months. In June 2015, Zillion Dreams, a mobile-first real estate marketplace for buyers, sellers, agents and builders had reached 50 Indian cities.

In February 2015, peer to peer property platform NoBroker had raised $3M in funding from SAIF Partners and Fulcrum Ventures to strengthen its 'non-broker' ecosystem and expand to major cities in India. Another player in this space is BroEx, short for Broker Exchange, which claimed to have 15,000 real estate agents registered on their platform in June.

Future plans

With Plat, Housing.com aims to strengthen its technology know-how to better cater to the needs of the agent community. This will help them drive efficiency in communications and operations such as posting leads and enhancing property showcase experience, thereby closing deals faster.

BigBHK allows its partners to manage their property portfolios with a web based property management solution. Housing plans to using their technology, to help partners streamline their realty lifecycle encompassing rental accounting, e-Invoicing, record management, complaint tracking and inventory management.

From an end consumer’s standpoint, BigBHK which runs operations across Bangalore, Hyderabad and Pune will provide tenants access to a free platform to raise complaints, track rent dues and maintenance amount on a monthly basis.  

YourStory Take

After the recent layoffs, Rahul Yadav saga and their 'Look Up' marketing campaign, Housing seems to be focusing on core business issues such as streamlining supply portfolio, that has been a tough problem for almost all real estate players to crack. This move also signals more consolidation in the online real estate domain.

Website: Housing.com