Housing.com to expand into interiors segment

Portal has already started offering rental agreement documents and home loans to its consumers

After having raised $121 million in two years, Housing.com plans to offer services in interior designing, furniture, movers and packers and home loans.

Advitiya Sharma, co-founder said, “We see these as logical expansion.” The portal has tied up with eight financial institutions — HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Citibank, DHFL and L&T Finance are some.

“Over the next two quarters, we will tie up with others to provide home loans and also expand into providing services in interior designing, furniture space and movers and packers,” said Sharma.

Housing.com has already started offering rental agreement documents and home loans to its consumers. It currently has 350,000 verified listings and 15,000 new projects.

The less-than-two-year-old company, one of the top recruiters at Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) this placement season, plans to expand to 300 cities from the present 45 cities that it operates in. It has a data collection team of nearly 500 and employs around 1,500 people. It offered 150 jobs across IIT campuses this year. It is also exploring a franchise model.

The start-up, originally known as Housing.co.in, bought the Housing.com domain name and a national number for $1 million.

The portal has as many as 20,000 broker-members. In June, it raised $2.5 million from Nexus Venture Partners after two rounds of angel funding from a group of investors led by Zishaan Hayath, co-founder of the phone commerce company Chaupaati Bazaar, and former Network18 chief executive officer Haresh Chawla. Kishore Biyani’s Future Group acquired Chaupaati Bazaar couple of years ago.

Housing.com has also tied up with around 8,000 builders and 1.5 lakh landlords to provide customers with a quality real estate product. The company says data verification is core to its business and, thus, it trains staff to deal with partner brokers and landlords. The staff not only collect information about a flat/plot and its surroundings, but also take high resolution pictures for the website. The data is verified by an in-house team before being uploaded.