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Relationship managers offering customers personal attention were the hallmark of the banking and the mobile phones businesses. Now, real estate company Grabhouse has pioneered the assigning of a relationship manager to a client in the real estate sector. The manager will be well versed with the locality and will be responsible for all arrangements — transport, site visits and even refreshments for prospective customers.
The online realtor calls them “neighbourhood specialists”, but is currently offering the facility only in Bengaluru. Depending on how successful the idea becomes and after a cost analysis, it will be rolled out across all cities where Grabhouse operates.
“Once properties are shortlisted, we assign the neighbourhood specialists to take customers at their convenience to the sites and help them in zero in in on a purchase,” said the company’s co-founder and CEO Prateek Shukla. Grabhouse will also start offering legal agreement services to tenants/owners for a nominal fee soon.
Grabhouse is also mulling a tie-up with app-based taxi firms such as Ola and Uber for travel to housing sites. Rental services for expats, a category that has a huge demand in big cities, is also likely to come up.
The portal offers rental and PG services in Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad and Bengaluru without any involvement of a broker. It will expand to Delhi-NCR, Kolkata and Chennai by the end of this year, Founded in July 2013 by Pankhuri Srivastava and Shukla, Grabhouse attracts about 500,000 visitors daily, mainly through referrals and word of mouth. It is the first real estate portal that helps people find compatible roommates while renting accommodation. The portal’s site has an online compatibility test based on likes and dislikes such as vegetarian/non vegetarian, smoker/non-smoker, late night party goer or not, et cetera.
Funding for the new initiatives could come through plans to raise $10-15 million in the next 2-3 months, Shukla said. In January this year, the company had raised $2.5 million in Series A funding from Kalaari Capital and Sequoia Capital. It plans to use the funds to develop new products and increase its presence across the country. It had raised $500,000 from the existing investor, India Quotient, in July last year, and had earlier raised an undisclosed amount of funding from India Quotient and MV Krishnan of Deutsche Bank in November 2013. It had also raised seed funding from RB Partners’ Chetan Bohra and Navin Ranka in early 2013 when it was launched.
The online realty medium is becoming increasingly popular and is estimated to have had as many as eight million people searching for information last year in India, according to analysts.
