 "Housing.com looks to expand into interiors segment")
After having raised more than $121 million in two years, in five rounds of funding, Housing.com now plans to offer services in interior designing, furniture, movers and packers and provide home-loans.
Elaborating on this, Advitiya Sharma, Co-founder, Housing.com said, "We see these as logical expansion."
Housing.com has already started offering rental agreement documents and home loans to its consumers. It currently has over 350,000 verified listings and more than 15,000 new projects.
The less-than-two-year-old company which was among the biggest recruiters at the IITs this 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. Sharma said the company will hire more people going forward as it looks at expansion. It is also exploring the franchising model.
Last September, the start-up, originally known as Housing.co.in, bought the Housing.com domain name and a national number for $1 million.
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. So one can search for a house with 'child friendliness index' or 'housing lifestyle ratings' or 'price heat map' feature, which would enable users to check prices of localities across a city on a map.