 "Online house rental space hots up as Grabhouse secures Rs 65 crore in Series B funding")
It had raised $2 million in Series A funding in November 2014. Co-founded in 2013 by Prateek Shukla and Pankhuri Shrivastava, both engineers and passionate coders, Grabhouse's objective is to make house hunting/renting a hassle-free experience through technology. It provides rental listings of flats and paying guest accommodations.
According to a July report by India Brand Equity Foundation, the Indian real estate market size is expected to touch $180 billion by 2020. The housing segment alone contributes about 5-6% to India's GDP while the real estate sector is the second major contributor. The report observed that real estate has emerged as the second most active sector, raising $1.2 billion from private equity investors in 10 months.
"Our key differentiator has been and will always be our technology-led approach targeted towards making online experience hassle-free. We are confident this infusion will help us realise our goals faster and increase our presence," said Shrivastava, who is also the chief marketing officer at Grabhouse.
Grabhouse is present in 11 cities, including Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida, Faridabad, Ghaziabad, Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru, Pune, Mumbai and Hyderabad. The start-up has a two-way revenue strategy. While a customer gets any two recommendations free of cost, he or she has to pay to receive details for the remaining suggestions. If the customer requires additional offline assistance like a neighbourhood specialist, a premium fee is charged on closure of the deal. THe firm has 22 full-time neighbourhood specialists who help customers finalise an accommodation.
Currently, Grabhouse generates a monthly traffic of 4.5 million and is growing at 115%. Last month, it had pocketed a revenue of Rs 50 lakh.
It is looking to add more services such as virtual neighbourhood specialists to replace people and is working on two new products in the shared accommodation space.
Grabhouse has a strict broker-free policy in place. To ensure this, the company developed a tool before launching its website through which all broker details were collected and blocked. Currently, it has about 200,000 brokers blocked on the platform. Grabhouse also encourages users to identify brokers. Often, users are incentivised to report a broker. Pankhuri added that the company has often faced resistance from the brokers community in Bengaluru.
"Renting space in India is in need of some revolutionary thinking and measures to make house-hunting a joyous experience, across the board. Grabhouse, through a combination of technology and smart analytics, is addressing that need. Hence, together we should grow from strength to strength," said Vani Kola of Kalaari Capital.
