Commonfloor.com, a real estate and apartment management portal, raised a Series B funding from existing investor, Accel India and Tiger Global Management, a New York-based investment firm. The company did not disclose the amount raised.
This is further to the first round, raised from Accel India in 2009. The new funds will be used for scaling presence across multiple cities, upgrading technology capabilities, hiring talent and expanding marketing initiatives.
“We are looking to expand operations and better our services. In the last couple of years, we have witnessed a significant uptake of our services across metros and Tier 1 cities, where consumers are increasingly shifting to the Internet to gather information about real estate. The market is growing rapidly and with our growing user-base we are ideally positioned to leverage this momentum. The investments from Accel India and Tiger Global (investors in companies like Facebook and Flipkart) underline the potential of online solutions for real estate needs and the growth expected in this sector,” said Sumit Jain, Co-founder and CEO, CommonFloor.
Venture capitalist firms have been investing in real estate portals. Accel Partners earlier has invested $5 million in online property marketing for first time home buyers PropTiger, along with SAIF partners. India Angel Network has invested $1 million in group buying property site, Groffr and Helion Venture Partners have invested around $12 million into India Homes.
CommonFloor started operations from Bangalore in 2007, by Sumit Jain, Lalit Mangal and Vikas Malpani, and is currently used by customers in over 120 cities across India. The company has close to 50,000 communities listed with it, constituting more than 25 lakh homes and recently opened offices in Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad and Pune.
CommonFloor.com has a listing of a variety of properties like apartments, row houses, villas and plots from over 1,000 builders across the country. The company also recently launched a new map based search feature for property buying and renting. Integrated with Google Maps, map based search enables users to locate properties available for sale / rent on a map, in addition to a keyword based search.