Housing.com is an e-real estate website which was started by a group of 12 students from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT Bombay), in June 2012. The company fulfills its users housing requirement based n geography, number of rooms, and various other categories. The company operates in more than 40 cites around the nation including, Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata and more. With 6,000 brokers company provides more than 650,000 houses in India.
Elara Technologies is the parent company of Housing.com and two other e-real estate firms, such as PropTiger and Makaan. On Monday the company has acquired another real estate portal called FastFox.com, in a deal of Rs. 100 crore. With the new acquisition, The Singapore-based firm has now entered the online-to-offline home rental space that has a market value of Rs. 20,000 crore.
“Up Until, we were in the home rental market through adding on both our platforms, Housing.com and Makaan.com. The new deal will now supple end-to-end on ground assistance to both tenants and landlords in partnership with other brokers,” said Elara’s CEO Dhruv Agarwal. He added, “Housing.com’s ‘Heat map’ technology and algorithm has potential to find area according to the users preference with the unique on-ground accomplishment of Fastfox is the right combination. ”
In December, Housing.com decided to invest $5 million by March of this year on branding and promotion to increase and expand their market and customer base. Singapore-based Elara Technologies acquired housing.com in 2012.
“It’s now almost three years for the date of merger with Housing.com. The amalgamation process is complete and gone. The e-housing brand has always been very popular and we believe that this is the right time and position for us to launch a fresh campaign for our brand to further build recall and empathy for the brand,” said Agarwal.
Housing.com has ‘Love Per Square Foot’ starts, Vicky Kaushal and Kaira Advani for its latest commercial, that showcased smart search technology offered by the brand. The campaign is targeting more on millennials. “We will be spending almost $5 million over the period of next four months in this campaigning,” Agarwal added.
Housing.com grew by 125% within Fiscal Year of 2017-18 and reached the year-on-year growth of 95% in the new fiscal year. The company earns revenues from advertisements placed by developers, house owners, and brokers, also through the other marketing tools such as 3D visualization and augmented reality, used by builders.
The biggest competitors of Housing.com are 99acres.com, MagicBricks.com, and Quikr in the e-housing market.
