Homegrown property consultant Anarock has recorded Rs 100 crore revenues last fiscal, the first year of operation, and aims to more than double it in 2018-19, its founder and Chairman Anuj Puri said.
The company has hired about 1,500 employees so far, and plans to reach 2,000 headcount by end of this fiscal, he added.
After quitting global property consultant JLL India in February last year, Puri decided to set up his own venture and bought JLLR, the residential brokerage arm of JLL where he served as chairman and country head for 10 years.
Few months later in June, he renamed the company as Anarock Property Consultants.
"We have achieved Rs 100 crore revenues during 2017-18 fiscal as envisaged by us. Now, we have set a target of Rs 225 crore revenues in the current fiscal year," Puri told PTI.
The company will hire more people and set up offices in new cities to expand presence and tap huge opportunities in India's housing brokerage market estimated at about Rs 18,000 crore, he added.
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"Our aim is to capture 10 per cent of housing brokerage market in the next five years," said Puri, who has experience of more than 20 years in Indian real estate.
Anarock has invested more than Rs 100 crore since April last year for rolling out the business in 13 cities.
It competes with the likes of News Corp-backed PropTiger.com, Square Yards and 360 Realtors apart from small and unorganised brokers.
Asked about the challenges faced in setting up this venture, Puri said: "One of the biggest challenges was the massive amount of effort that we had to put in rolling-out nationwide business operations and mobilizing resources for such scale".
From having a perfect branding for the new venture to finding the right office spaces to attract qualified talent were difficult task, he added.
With technology at core of its business, Puri said another challenge was to build the right platform and product portfolio.
Anarock roped in Rahul Yadav, the co-founder of realty startup Housing.com, for creating the technological capacity.
Puri said Anarock was launched at a time when the housing sector was in great pain because of note ban and implementation of new realty law RERA and the GST.
However, he said this in a way also worked to its advantage. "We were able to catch the new wave of enforced transparency and ethics, which are the foundation stones of our own business philosophy".
With housing market plagued with subdued demand and unsold units, Puri said there is great demand for our services but the company only works with credible developers and right projects.
Besides housing brokerage, Anarock has started separate divisions for providing consultancy services in retail, hospitality, capital market and land among others as part of its plan to add new revenue streams.