Housing.com is a Mumbai-based real estate search portal which allows customers to search for housing based on geography, number of rooms, and various other filters.[1][2] The company has 6,000 brokers and serves 40 cities in India including Chennai, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata and Delhi.[3][4][5]
A group of twelve students from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay founded Housing.co.in in June 2012.[1][6][7][8] The company purchased Housing.com from San Francisco-based internet entrepreneur, Peter Headington, and the telephone number 03-333-333-333 in September 2013 for a total of $1m.[9][10]
Since its founding in 2012, Housing.com has raised four rounds of funding. The company raised $2.5 million in Series A funding from Nexus Venture Partners in June 2013.[2][3][4][11] The company used the funds to create its Data Science Lab and to expand to four cities: Bengaluru, Gurugram, Pune, Hyderabad.
[3][12][13] The company raised another $19M in venture funding, led by Helion Venture Partners, in April 2014.[14][15]
In early March 2015, the company had a nationwide brand launch, and revealed its new brand logo, colours and brand philosophy; with the tagline 'Look Up'. The brand launch was advertised in national newspapers and hoardings in several cities across India; and notably, on the company's social media pages.
In June 2015, Housing.com then-CEO Rahul Yadav accused Sequoia India MD Shailendra Singh of poaching Housing.com staff.[16] Subsequently, he was asked to leave the company altogether, citing objectionable behaviour.[17][18] Rishabh Gupta was temporarily in charge, before being replaced by Jason Kothari in November 2015.[19]
Housing.com lists properties submitted by users, either brokers or owners, on an interactive map.[6] Search results are filtered by available rooms, lifestyle ratings, child friendliness index (CFI), and area-based pricing.[2][3][7][9][20]
The company has mapped approximately 650,000 houses in India.[4][12]
Housing.com's Data Science Lab (DSL) has generated a number of "Heat Map" algorithms and demand flux maps based on these filters.[5][13] The CFI heat map shows child friendliness in a particular area and it measures neighborhoods on three different criteria: number of schools, number of hospitals and parks, and proximity of these facilities to the area.[9] The algorithms also demonstrate price variations in properties across the city.[5][10]
Housing.com is also available as apps for Android and iOS.[6]
Housing.com acquired real estate discussion forum, Indian Real Estate Forum (IREF), for $1.2 Million [21] and Realty BI, a risk assessment firm for realty projects, for $2 Million.[22]
Housing.com acquired HomeBuy360, a cloud-based sales lifecycle management platform, for $2 million.[23] They had been merged with Proptiger.
