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‘WE WANTED TO START A COMPANY THAT WOULD STREAMLINE THE CHAOTIC REAL ESTATE SECTOR’

NoBroker is an online platform that helps individuals find residences without the help of brokers. They work on the backbone of highly sophisticated technology. At NoBroker.com, Artificial intelligence and Machine learning algorithm are designed to keep the broker out of the system. When a new customer registers on the site, the algorithm works in the […]

NoBroker is an online platform that helps individuals find residences without the help of brokers. They work on the backbone of highly sophisticated technology. At NoBroker.com, Artificial intelligence and Machine learning algorithm are designed to keep the broker out of the system. When a new customer registers on the site, the algorithm works in the background and validates the user. The platform has raised total funding of more than $151M from SAIF partners, Beenext, KTB Ventures, and General Atlantic, post this latest round in

April 2020, the valuation stands at $361 mn. NoBroker was founded by Amit Agarwal, Akhil Gupta & Saurabh Garg in 2014.

Q: Tell us about your business model.

A: NoBroker is a technology driven real estate platform that connects property owners with property seekers without any brokerage. It makes real estate transactions seamless, efficient, free from biases, and transparent. It started in 2014 with the zero-brokerage proposition but today it has become a one-stop shop for all property related needs.

We thought of this idea post a string of bad personal experiences while house hunting. We found it absurd that nobody up until then had questioned how the amount charged as brokerage justified the service provided. Currently, we have four different verticals: our core vertical for property search that connects landlords, tenants, buyers, and sellers, NoBroker Pay (for rent and maintenance payments), NoBroker Homes Services (packers & movers, interiors, home cleaning, painting, repairs, etc.), and NoBrokerHood (society super app by NoBroker).

Q: How the company started, and please share the transformation journey till now.

A: The company was conceptualized resulting from bad personal experiences that we have all had at one point in time while searching for the perfect home. We realized that while many platforms had made property inventory available, they had mostly become a tool for the brokers to scout customers. Brokers post false property images and lure genuine customers only to add to their existing woes. That is when we decided to start a company that would disrupt and streamline the vastly unorganized real estate sector in true sense. For generations, brokers have been demanding huge intermediation costs and adding zero or limited value to the real estate transaction. So, we decided to create a platform where only genuine property owners, buyers, sellers, and tenants can interact.

We turned unicorn last year and are thrilled by the way it has all panned out. We are very grateful to our customers who have believed in our vision and mission and have supported our endeavour. Today, we are the country’s first proptech unicorn, and very delighted at the thought of having saved brokerage upwards of INR 5000 crores for our customers.

The scariest of the journey was a day when a mob of brokers vandalized our office. Although initially scary, the incident told us that we have succeeded in making an actual difference in the space. We were making a difference in the lives of millions of Indians across the country who simply did not want to do a real estate transaction with unjustified costs or hassle.

Today, apart from our core real estate business, we are also into allied services such as NoBroker Financial Services, NoBroker Home Services, and NoBrokerHood. We are currently looking to expand our home loan vertical as well.

Q: Which cities are you present in?

A: At present, NoBroker operates in six cities: Bengaluru, Chennai, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Pune and Delhi-NCR. We plan to expand our footprints in 50 more cities in the next two to three years. Our society super app, NoBrokerHood, is currently present in 11 cities (Bengaluru, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, Delhi-NCR, Kolkata, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Kochi, and Nagpur). Our ultimate goal is to become a one-stop center for all real estate related needs.

Q: Tell us about your flagship product. Also, how is it differentiated from other products in the market?

A: What sets us apart from other players in the space is NoBroker’s the zero-brokerage proposition. On this platform, we offer verified listings from genuine property owners without the unnecessary intervention or intermediation costs. We have been in this industry for close to eight years, and even now, there is no other player, big or small, in the real estate ecosystem that offers a broker-free platform. This is our USP.

Q: Tell us about your team culture. What is your team size and how do you ensure they are aligned with the company’s vision?

A: NoBroker’s team culture is built on transparency and ownership. It is built not on hierarchy but meritocracy. We have designed the office space in a way that everyone is accessible. The founders do not have cabins and sit with their respective teams. The leadership team has been with the company from the start and they either have worked with us in the past or have come from a close referral. That is one way we ensure that we get the best hires whose goals are aligned to ours. Our team size is currently at 2500.

Q: What are your future plans, both short and long-term goals?

A: We are planning to penetrate deeper into existing cities and enter more cities. We are focused on strengthening all our verticals across all our existing cities and become and A-Z solutions provider for all real estate related transactions. For NoBrokerHood we aim to penetrate at least 100,000 societies in the next two years.

We are presently registering a 5X YOY growth and strive to make it 10X. Our future plan is to strengthen our holistic business model and proliferate our reach.

Q: Tell us about your recent funding, revenues and user base. Also, tell us about the challenges that you have faced in your journey.

A: By the end of last year, we raised USD 210 million in the Series E funding round and became India’s first proptech unicorn. At present, we have more than 1.6 crore registered users that have availed NoBroker services. On the core NoBroker platform, we have more than 75 lakh verified listings.

We have faced multiple issues during our groundbreaking journey. For instance, it was quite a challenge to get investors interest as we did not have an existing successful model. We had created a solution for a problem unique to India.

Also, the technological prowess that helped us remove brokerage with algorithms assisting consumers in finding their desired outcome took tremendous effort. Our technology is a first in the ecosystem, so we had no prior examples of taking reference from. Furthermore, considering that a no-broker format was new to consumers, we had to solely depend on word-of-mouth advertising.

Having said that, it all contributed to making NoBroker what it is today a middlemen-free platform that caters to the needs of real estate stakeholders with efficiency and convenience. From the days when venture capitalists dismissed our fundraising proposals to becoming India’s first unicorn in the proptech space, the journey has been tough but incredibly rewarding.

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