Homesfy – improving move-in experience of home buyers
There are many companies now that help one to find that new house. Property discovery platforms like 99acre, Magicbricks, Housing, and Commonfloor have made our lives so easy.
Real estate is a multi-billion dollar market with $1billion spent on marketing alone by developers and brokers. That is the reason why companies like Commonfloor and Housing were able to raise more than $100 million in funding. There are more startups in real estate like Grabhouse, RealtyCompass and GharFinder that are trying to solve different issues of house buyers.
But problems with the real estate market, it seems, are never ending.
Problems of buyer – There are problems aplenty for the buyer. He needs to contact innumerable middlemen for finding his dream house, go through legal hassles for documentation, figure out furnishing and furbishing options, haggle with movers and packers, and so on. Net result: emotional, physical and financial fatigue. You muscle through all these issues because you cannot up and leave as it is a huge investment.
Problems of brokers and developers – They pay a lot of money to list properties without any guarantee on conversion. They waste time and money attending hundreds of call, meeting potential buyers and hiring talent to cater to them. Still they are unable to provide a complete solution to customers.
As an end buyer, we do not indulge in property transactions too often, ideally not more than once in a lifetime. So all we want is a house that becomes a home in little time and which actually fits our profile and budget.
There is a huge gap between listing of properties and moving into our dream house.
Homesfy aims to be the solution in such instances in the form of a property services platform: a marketplace for property search and all related services that gives real-time, profiled solutions to every property-related issue. Homesfy is tech and service layer between real estate buyers and service providers.
Homesfy helps buyers find the right home and vendors for moving in, packing and shifting, home improvement, legal and documentation work, handymen, locality trips and other home buying services.
The company claims to help brokers by providing them qualified leads so that they can close deals and provide a complete solution to drive customer stickiness. They remove all duplicate property listing for brokers and developers and put out no commercials until a transaction is successful.
“As many, including myself, were grappling with house hunting in Mumbai, the experience of our own customers and prospects gave us a vision. Our team conducted one-on-one interactions, persona study, broker survey and thorough research resulting in a bulk of unabridged list of problems,” says Ashish Kukreja, Founder, Homesfy.
Ashish’s vision is to make property search easy and cheap. His own experience while searching property incited him to offer profile-based property search. He spearheads new business initiatives, business development and product strategy. He has an experience of scaling up new business vertical with names like Kotak and Unicon where he was responsible for 10X + business growth in equity broking and private wealth management. Ashish is an MBA from IBS, Hyderabad.
Mukesh Mishra is the Co-founder who drives sales and partner relationship with help of his domain knowledge. He is working towards becoming a dominant player in organised property search market across all major urban locations in India and completely drives the P/L. As part of the founding team he delivered some pathbreaking solutions to grow business with low client acquisition cost. Mukesh is a certified real estate advisor. He loves travelling which also helps him study property across various locations.
Both found that the market is never void of needs, so they decided to start from where the other listing portals stop.
They realised that it is right time to graduate from a property search platform to a problem-solving and absolute budget-friendly platform where they can improve buyer’s moving-in experience.
Mukesh says, “The first six monthshad us driving around our customers across their preferred localities offering free services for property hunting. I was introduced as driver in some of the trips. From Month seven to 13, we saw exceptional sales;we cracked a whopping 110 deals! Our customer-centric approach and a policy of not saying no to their needs have taken us to Dubai to close a transaction for an elderly couple.”
The company started with a humble Rs 15-lakh dealand has now gallopedits way to closing deals worth Rs15 crore in present day.
The company has generated over $75million in GMV since inception and has got funding of Rs onecrore in two tranches through angel investors- Merisis Advisors, a boutique investment banking firm and Allure,a company in diamond trading business.
They currently provide services across Mumbai and Bengaluru regions only and are looking to expand across Pune, Hyderabad and Chennai in the next couple of years. With expansion,the company will cross 100 million GMV with transactions of more than 1,000 apartments involving 500 active partners.
Ashish says, “The front is simpler, but the backend keeps us up all night. Our technology stratagem brings everything under one tech layer. We had to build one platform that would declutter the chaos. Giving all stakeholders a plug and play solution was necessary.”
Homesfy is aiming to minimise property search time by delivering 100check points, to zero in on the most ideal property and move-in services for frictionless home buying experience.
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