Housing.com is one of the fastest growing startups in India which was co-founded by a group of 12 passionate engineers from IIT Bombay, led by Rahul Yadav and Aditya Sharma. Their vision was to build a tool which simplifies peoples’ search to find houses online.
The startup was to have a very strong technology foundation and hence, the team continuously thrive to come out with new features like 3D Online models of homes. The team believes features such as this will attract more and more home-seekers to the site.
Housing.com comprises of a team of dedicated engineers, economists, developers, problem solvers and artists who love innovating and keeping pace with the existing demand in the real estate market. The website has seen phenomenal growth ever since it was established in 2012. It has spread its reach to 11 cities and grown from 12 people to a staggering employee strength of 1500 across 45 cities. It has manually verified around 1 lakh properties.
Housing earlier had listings from the founder’s own network but later moved on to get data from real estate agents and landlords.
Once the founders knew that their local presence was being felt, they took the company global from Housing.co.in to Housing.com.
The domain was acquired at $500K.
Building A Team
Housing.com believes in hiring people from premier institutes, and always believes in hiring top candidates, which they call as an A+ team, and feel they will not compromise on the top-notch hiring. They have worked a lot on creating a brand for themselves among the youth, and hence expect and hire the right talent.
Housing.com pays its employees in the salary bracket of 12-18 lakhs per annum, and the recruited candidates undergo an extensive training program of 4 weeks, before they are on the field to handle their responsibilities. The startup has about 50 people from IITs who lead the team along. The interview procedure is very strong and extensive, to ensure that the best and deserving lot is picked up. People are sent to the field, where they take photographs of apartments, understanding their exact location, gather complete information about the property to be listed on the portal, giving the end-user the most genuine information about the property.
Expansion and Scaling
The company has plans to expand to tier-2 and tier-3 cities as well. Soft-Bank acquired a 30% Stake in Housing.com after investing $70 million, and Housing.com is currently valued at $250million(1500 Crores). There were other investors who invested namely Falcon Edge, DST Global, Halion Venture Partners, Qualcomm Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners. The funding was used to expand operations for Housing.com.
Housing plans to revamp their mobile application and website, and scale their product to other developing nations. The core team of Housing.com sits in Mumbai, and there are brainstorming sessions to make their offering more useful and valuable for users every day. The founders aim at bringing awareness about Housing.com among NRIs and people staying in other remote places or tier-3 cities.