Housing tries to reverse its cash burn through acquisitions

Housing acquired Plat, a networking app for real estate agents and BigBHK, a property management software, reports Tech in Asia

Housing, one of the hottest start-ups in India, is notorious for its high cash burn. Last year, the company reported a loss of $8 million against a revenue of merely $300,000. However, it has recently taken tough steps to pull up its socks.
 

It sacked 600 employees as it shut down a few non-core segments like commercial properties, short stays and land businesses. It is also adding new revenue streams through acquisitions. The latest ones are Plat, a networking app for real estate agents, and BigBHK, which develops property management software.
 

Earlier, it acquired Homebuy360, a sales cycle management platform for real estate developers.
 

With Plat, Housing strengthens its technology know-how to cater to the agent community. 
 

With these acquisitions, Chitransh Sahai, Gautam Prem Jain, Ayush Lodhi, and Ankit Aggarwal from Plat and Ankur Kumar and Atul Yadav from BigBHK have joined the Housing team. They are engineers who graduated from premier institutes like Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi and BITS Pilani. The buy-outs are acqui-hires.
 

The deal size remains undisclosed.
 

Balancing act

Among Housing’s other acquisitions are Indian Real Estate Forum (IREF), a community platform for property-related discussions and Realty BI, which provides real estate related risk analysis to property buyers and financial institutions.

To balance its books, Housing plans to cease operations in smaller cities and focus on revenue-generation and building an advertisement business in large cities and towns.
 

Housing is one of the most heavily funded start-ups in India. Last year, SoftBank pumped $90 million in the start-up. The Japanese giant is said to have agreed to invest another $30 million in the company as a bridge round, provided Housing meets certain operational targets. Housing claims to have crossed a million verified property listings in its rent and resale sections.

This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here.