Jul 3, 2021

Jul 3, 2021—12 min read Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by NoBroker. Anything that has to do with real estate, specifically as a purchaser, is convoluted and annoying. The constant nagging by middlemen and sellers, lack of fluid communication, and running helter-skelter to get the paperwork done are just a few of the obstacles in the world of real estate. However, there's a shining light at the end of this real estate tunnel. NoBroker, a Bangalore-based startup in the real estate search domain, is connecting flat owners with tenants/buyers directly and making buying-selling of real estate simpler. NoBroker.com helped Indian real estate customers save over INR 5000 crore in brokerage to date. The platform continues to witness more than 20,000 people finding a property through NoBroker in a month. Its visitor and community management app, NoBrokerHood, currently caters to residents in more than 10,000 societies across StartupTalky interviewed Mr. Saurabh Garg, Co-Founder & CBO of NoBroker to get insights on the Startups Journey and Growth Story of NoBroker. Read on to know more about NoBroker, its owner, business model, revenue model, competitors, app, founders, revenue, funding & more. NoBroker Co-founder - Saurabh Garg NoBroker - About and Vision NoBroker.com’s vision is to use technology to disrupt the Indian real estate brokerage market worth around $19 billion. Its aim is to leverage cutting-edge tech to address information asymmetry in the Indian real estate market, eliminate brokerage, and build an information-based, service-driven ecosystem for the prospective Indian home-seeker. It also wants to be a one-stop shop catering to all the needs in the real-estate journey. NoBroker - Real Estate Industry Details IBEF estimates that the Indian real estate market will reach $650 billion, amounting to 13% of the country’s GDP, by 2025. By 2030, the sector is expected to be worth $1 trillion. This growth across residential and commercial spaces will be chiefly driven by the growing urbanization of tier-II and tier-III regions, an increase in the average household income level, and the rise of nuclear families. Another factor driving this growth will be the increasing shift towards homeownership in the wake of the pandemic. The COVID-19 outbreak made people realize the importance of owning a home and the financial security that comes with an appreciating physical asset. This changing consumer sentiment reflects the market trends. In its Indian Residential Market Update Q1 2021, Knight Frank highlighted how residential sales have been on a steady rise since Q2 2020; the quarterly sales, by Q1 2021, had surpassed the pre-COVID sales numbers in 2019 for two consecutive quarters. This positive sentiment is expected to prevail in the coming years. The commercial real estate market is also on the rebound. Market experts believe that, now that the second wave has been brought under control, people and businesses will be more willing to return to physical offices. This will increase the absorption rate of commercial real estate spaces; leading players in the space are already registering a rebound in top urban and tier-1 markets, with other regional markets expected to follow suit. NoBroker was founded by Amit Kumar Agarwal, Akhil Gupta, and Saurabh Garg. "I first met Akhil when we were studying at IIT Bombay and Amit at IIM Ahmedabad. Convincing them was not tough, as we had all had our fair share of hassle when looking for properties" says Saurabh Garg, Co-founder & CBO, NoBroker. Today, they are a team of 2500+ highly motivated individuals consistently working to offer better services to over 1.25 crore happy customers across Bangalore, Mumbai , Pune , Chennai , Hyderabad , and Delhi-NCR . (L-R) Amit Kumar Agarwal, Akhil Gupta, Saurabh Garg Amit Kumar Aggarwal | Co-founder & CEO, NoBroker.com With over 15 years of experience in management consulting and strategy, Amit has worked with leading global companies such as PricewaterhouseCoopers and ANZ Bank. Before he took the entrepreneurial leap with NoBroker.com, he has worked with top CXOs across leading Indian and international banks to formulate business strategy and enhance profitability. He has a highly successful track record of guiding entry and portfolio strategy , as well as large-scale policy implementation, and has won several industry accolades for his accomplishments. In his role as the CEO of NoBroker.com, Amit spearheads the organization’s overall vision and direction and is responsible for defining and gilding its corporate strategies. Amit is an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and IIM, Ahmedabad. Akhil Gupta | Co-founder & CTO, NoBroker.com Akhil is the CTO of NoBroker.com and has been instrumental in building the foundation for NoBroker’s spectacular growth. He spearheads the entire tech vertical and is responsible for building, scaling, and managing teams, as well as driving business growth. Akhil worked with Oracle before co-founding NoBroker.com. During the first year of operations, when the company was bootstrapping, Akhil single-handedly coded and managed the NoBroker.com platform. He continues to oversee the product and platform development, and always tries to find a way to optimize existing processes and heighten the customer experience . His commitment to efficiency and finding disruptive solutions to the most difficult business challenges has led to NoBroker.com leading the industry with many firsts, such as AMP/PWA, WhatsApp chat feature, and the use of AI and ML to provide rent prediction and recommendations. Many of the products built at NoBroker.com are used as successful case studies by Google and Facebook . He holds a dual degree (B.Tech & M.Tech) from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. Saurabh Garg | Co-founder & CBO, NoBroker Saurabh holds more than 15 years of experience in marketing and business strategy, having worked in the Sales and Marketing team at Hindustan Unilever Limited , apart from co-founding Four Fountains De-Stress Spa. His experience with Hindustan Unilever and as an entrepreneur gave him ample insights that have helped in his role as the Chief Business Officer at NoBroker.com. He is also responsible for pursuing strategic alliances with real estate developers and corporates to bring high-quality supply and demand at a low cost to expand the revenue stream. At NoBroker.com, Saurabh built the marketing team from scratch and empowered them to take on new challenges and try new and disruptive solutions without fearing failure. This freedom to experiment is part of the reason why NoBroker.com has achieved over 10 million app downloads with zero marketing costs. The platform also has the lowest customer acquisition costs in the competitive Indian real estate sector. He is an alumnus of IIT Bombay and IIM Ahmedabad. NoBroker - Product/Service NoBroker.com addresses the gap of information asymmetry in Indian real estate. It’s disruptive solution connects property seekers with property owners, a process that earlier used to cost as much as 1-2 months of rent or 4% of transaction amount as brokerage. The platform also provides personalized recommendations and assists with decision-making based on real-time data. "We are the only platform in the C2C space that directly connects tenants and buyers with owners and sellers" Saurabh added. The platform offers end-to-end one-stop solution for property seekers including services such as rental agreements, movers & packers services , home loans, interiors , special packages for NRIs, relocation services for corporates, remote property management services, etc. It also facilitates online rent payment via credit cards, debit cards, net banking, and UPI wallets. The platform’s visitor and community management super app- NoBrokerHood is currently optimizing society living across 10,000 societies in Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, Delhi-NCR, Kolkata , Ahmedabad , Nagpur, Jaipur , and Kochi. NoBroker History - How it started Reminiscing the start journey of NoBroker.com, Saurabh Garg (Co-founder & CBO of NoBroker) says - "We established NoBroker.com when we realized that the real estate search and discovery process was fragmented, opaque, inefficient, and full of hassles for the customer. The idea first germinated after the awful experiences that we personally had with brokers while looking for a property. All the other online platforms are also marketing platforms for brokers and it is very difficult to contact owner/seller directly. This dependence on the broker made the experience horrible for the customer. Brokers subject customers to biases, pressures, and manipulations" He continued - "Through NoBroker.com, we wanted to empower Indian home-seekers to find a home of their choice in a hassle free manner without paying a hefty brokerage. We did not have a prototype or a model to copy from as this was a solution built for a problem unique to Indian real estate. Brokerage has been an accepted norm for generations and therefore, penetrating the market with as disruptive a solution was not easy. The idea was simple yet bold but we knew that there was a huge scope for it. We launched the website in March 2014. Once the customer understood the unique proposition, there was no turning back for us" NoBroker - Business Model and Revenue Model NoBroker is a digital peer-to-peer platform that allows homeowners/sellers and prospective tenants/buyers to connect directly without the involvement of a broker. It provides a subscription business model to customers who are looking to buy, sell or rent a property. Apart from that NoBroker is a one-stop shop providing services like packers and movers, home-cleaning, home painting, interiors and a lot more. These are also important sources of revenue for NoBroker. NoBroker - Name and Logo "The name had to be simple, self-explanatory and direct. So, when I saw that name NoBroker.in is available I booked it immediately back in 2007" says Saurabh. NoBroker Logo NoBroker - Startup Challenges Faced Real estate is a big sector and a vastly unorganized one. For generations, it had relied on traditional processes which involved a third party. For as long there has been real estate, there have been brokerage services. The team, therefore, focused on the most fundamental challenge faced by real estate customers: the service they were receiving was not commensurate with what the customer paid for it. As there was information asymmetry, people had no option but to rely on broker services. Real estate platforms have been around for decades and tried to solve the issue of information asymmetry. But they couldn’t keep brokers away from the system and brokers started exploring these platforms to their advantage. "When I – along with my Co-founders Amit and Akhil – formed NoBroker.com, we were determined to use technology to address the gaps in the property discovery creating a platform that was 100% brokerage free" Saurabh added. Their approach differed from other online real estate platforms in that they were essentially tying up with property brokers and getting them to list properties on their platforms. On the other hand, the team connected owners with sellers and tenants with buyers directly. Because of this approach, NoBroker's value proposition found a favorable reception with the customers. NoBroker has the highest number of owner listed properties. It bootstrapped for quite a few months. Getting investors to believe in its proposition was a challenge as the team did not have an existing successful model to convince them with. "But we were sure of our resolve and our solution, and the needle moved when we raised our first $20 million" Saurabh exclaims proudly. The pandemic ironically offered a shot in the arm as people could not use offline services and relied heavily on online platforms to search and finalise a house. One way or the other, the value conscious Indian customer has realised and appreciated NoBroker's unique proposition and helped it grow. NoBroker - Growth and Stats NoBroker.com helped Indian real estate customers save over INR 5000 crore in brokerage to date. The platform continues to witness more than 20,000 people finding a property through NoBroker in a month. It has 1.25 crore registered users across Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Delhi-NCR, making it the world’s largest P2P real estate platform. The platform also caters to the commercial property segment. Its visitor and community management app, NoBrokerHood, currently caters to residents in more than 10,000 societies across Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, Delhi – NCR, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Nagpur, Jaipur, and Kochi. NoBroker - Acquisitions NoBrokerHood acquired Society Connect in February 2020 to integrate the financial module with its services on one single platform and make society living easy and hassle-free. NoBroker - Awards and Recognition NoBroker.com is a market leader in ‘customer-to-customer’ real estate transactions and leading third-party endorsements have recognized the same, NoBroker.com was part of the elite ‘Champions of Change’ with the Prime Minister of India organized by the NITI Aayog NoBroker.com has been recognized as the “Coolest Startup” by the India Today Group Recognition from the Govt. of Gujarat as a promising startup for 2017 NoBroker recognized by Forbes Japan as one of the 20 hot startups in India NoBroker was listed as one of the top 100 startups (36 on readers rating) with gravity-defying momentum to look up to in 2017 by YourStory NoBroker bagged the Digital Marketer of the Year award by IAMAI in 2018 NoBroker - Future Plans The company’s short-term plans involve expanding within India. It aims to expand to 50 cities across the country within the next 2-3 years. NoBroker - FAQs NoBroker was founded by Amit Kumar Agarwal, Akhil Gupta, and Saurabh Garg. What is NoBroker? NoBroker, a Bangalore-based real estate search portal, is connecting flat owners with tenants/buyers directly and making buying-selling of real estate simpler. NoBroker removes the need for brokers in real estate related dealings. How much is the Revenue of NoBroker? In the fiscal year 2018, NoBroker's revenue from operations amounted to INR 8.6 crore while the company recorded a loss of INR 31.4 crore. NoBroker reported 48% increase in losses in the financial year 2019 at INR 46.5 crore. How NoBroker makes money? Around 70% of NoBroker's revenue comes from the subscription plans it offers on various packages. Advertisements from furniture start-ups also contribute significantly as NoBroker claims over 2.5 million user visits on its website per month. NoBroker also earns revenue by offering services such as connecting tenants with movers and packers and drafting rental agreements. Must have tools for startups - Recommended by StartupTalky