QuikrHomes launches cashless managed rentals, acquires 'Grabhouse'

India's leading digital real estate business QuikrHomes has announced the launch of its cashless managed rentals solution with the acquisition of Grabhouse, India's leading digitally-driven home rental solutions provider.

This strategic move will help the company address an acute pain point in India's real estate market with a solution that does not involve any cash payments. As part of this, Quikr will integrate Grabhouse's products and technology stack into QuikrHomes while also reaping strong synergies the business has with its other verticals.

Founded by Prateek Shukla and Pankhuri Shrivastava in July 2013, Grabhouse offers end-to-end digital solutions for the rental needs of both owners and tenants. The platform offers a managed rental homes model which comprises of a range of fully furnished, ready-to-move-in apartments across four major cities.

 

The managed rental homes model operates on top of a broader rental marketplace which offers the largest inventory of PGs and peer to peer rentals in India. The marketplace is present in 11 cities and has served 700,000 customers to date.

"We are very excited about the launch of our managed rentals model it brings convenience to consumers while eliminating cash from property rentals, and we are excited to start it with the acquisition of Grabhouse. Our business here will also benefit from unique competitive advantages as the Grabhouse target market has a great match with many of our other businesses such as C2C and bikes. On the cost side, the operational costs of the business will directly get shared with our services business," said COO Quikr, Atul Tewari.

"Grabhouse will provide a deeper solution for our large rental supply and demand flow across QuikrHomes and Commonfloor. We already dominate this sector in the country - this will help us expand our solutions portfolio while addressing the real estate industry's need to shift to cashless payments. And it will do this while helping a very large number of real estate owners and consumers," said Head of QuikrHomes, Manish Sinha.

Quikr has been growing both organically and inorganically. It has been steadily scaling each of its five verticals over the past couple of months and has also made other acquisitions to further accelerate its growth.