Housing.com to Reintroduce Rental Offering Ahead of Schedule

by Shrutee K/DNS

National, December 06, 2016: Housing.com, India’s most innovative and trusted real estate platform, announced today that it would be expanding its presence from the core business of Home Buying and Selling to include Home Rentals as well. Last year, Housing.com had taken a strategic decision to close Rentals in order to focus the Company on the Home Buying and Selling segment, the largest and the most lucrative real estate category in India. Housing.com has now started preparing for the re-entry and plans to launch Home Rentals early next year.

The decision of Housing.com to focus its resources on the Home Buying and Selling segment has led to a business turnaround and enabled the company to establish itself as the most popular online platform for buying and selling homes. Compared to last year, on a monthly basis, the Company's revenues have grown by 400%, operating costs have decreased by 70%, traffic has increased by more than 200% growing from 1.3M to 4.1M and number of homes listed have increased by over 450% growing from 110,000 to 630,000, making it the most popular platform for both home buyers and sellers.

With leadership established in its core business, Housing.com is now ready to expand into newer business opportunities in the online real estate space and entering rentals is the logical next move. While the Company had planned to relaunch rentals towards end of next year, the government’s recent demonetisation move has led to an advancement in the plans. Demonetisation is expected to cause a slow-down in the Home Buying and Selling segment, while it will likely spur growth in the home rentals space, making it an opportune time to relaunch the rentals business.

Commenting on the development, Jason Kothari, Chief Executive Officer, Housing.com said, “The Company has delivered exceptional results in the last one year and has achieved a successful business turnaround. We are excited with the progress and believe now is the right time to expand, starting with Rentals. Although we had planned to restart rentals around end of 2017, but the recent demonetisation move has led us to advance our plans. We have started the preparations, and we look forward to an aggressive launch early next year.” When Housing.com was founded in 2012, Rentals was one of the key focus areas for the Company. At the time of discontinuing rental operations, Housing.com was a leading player in the segment. With market leadership already established in the Home Buying and Selling segment and with the rental business slated to go live early next year, the Company will further strengthen and grow its leadership position in the online real estate segment.

About Housing.com: Founded in 2012, Housing.com is India's leading online real estate platform with 1.7 million verified homes listed to date, and an unparalleled online user experience. The Company is a technologically innovative real estate platform with a larger vision to bring more transparency, efficiency and trust across the real estate ecosystem in India.

Housing.com is the only provider of independently verified listings of every home listed, conducted by a trained team of data collectors, analysts, auditors and photographers. With over 100 data points per listing, the in-house Data Sciences Lab is empowered with a significant body of information to allow buyers and sellers to make more informed decisions. Housing.com is passionate about taking a 360 degree view on solving India's real estate challenges.

Housing.com has led a number of strategic acquisitions, such as the largest community forum on buying and selling homes (Indian Real Estate Forum), an established company focused on doing due diligence of new real estate projects (Realty Business Intelligence), and a popular software for developers to manage and enhance their marketing and sales efforts (HomeBuy360).

Housing.com has raised over $100 million in capital from India's leading investors, including Softbank, Nexus Ventures, Falcon Edge, Helion Ventures, Nirvana Ventures, Qualcomm, DST founder Yuri Milner, Viacom 18 co-founder Haresh Chawla, Snapdeal founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, among others.