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IndiaProperty.com, the Chennai-based realty portal, plans to raise $50 million from private equity ventures in the next few weeks which will be used mainly for expanding its presence in the North region.
The company is also looking at acquisitions in the research and technology space and currently, evaluating few proposals and expect to announce a deal soon.
“We are in advance discussions for raising funds to the tune of $50 million. It will happen within few weeks,” Ganesh Vasudevan, chief executive officer, IndiaProperty told Business Standard.
India Property Online Private Ltd, which owns the portal, was spun off as a separate entity from Consim Info Pvt Ltd (Bharat Matrimony group) in 2012.
He said the portal had seen a growth of 50 per cent year-on-year and seeing more traction on its mobile application. “Currently, South and West India are our major markets but we will be expanding our base in North aggressively. We will also go for branding initiatives.”
It earns revenues from advertisements by developers and a flat fee from subscriptions by customers.
Post the demerger, the company raised $7 million from Canaan Partners and Mayfield Fund. In its series B funding, the company raised $12 Million from Bertelsmann India Investment along with participation from existing investors Canaan Partners and Mayfield Fund, according to the information given by the company.
It employs around 1100 people employees across India.
The portal also offer services such as -- Assisted Property, first online assisted buying service, Gruhapravesh, first series of virtual and offline property shows and Pbytes to keep property seekers glued with exhaustive content on realty news, market update, home interiors and gardening tips.
Vasudevan said the portal has over 5 million registered users with over 7 lakh property listings. “With innovations such as visual search using augmented reality and 3DPanoX, the usage through our mobile application is now almost at par with desktop,” he said.
Last month, it launched a new service– Discover, a mobile first solution which provides all the information related to home buying.
Discover’s proprietary machine learning engine maps user behavior patterns and intelligently recommends various snippets of content that are relevant to the user. According to the company, the Discover engine understands the user’s context and presents the information on the Discover feed as Cards and is regularly refreshed with new information. The information in the feed includes news articles, market reports, localities of interest, price trends and properties matching the users interest along with regular project status updates
