Success Story

Startup Name- NoBroker

Headquarter: Bengaluru
Launch Date: 2014
Category: Real Estate
Founder(s): Amit Kumar Agarwal, Saurabh Garg, and Akhil Gupta

Mission and Vision

As the name suggests, NoBroker’s vision is to remove the need for brokers in real estate
related dealings.

Founders
NoBroker was founded by IIT(Bombay) and IIM Ahmedabad graduates—Amit Kumar
Agarwal, Akhil Gupta, and Saurabh Garg—they realized that brokers do not add value in a
real estate transaction and still charge commission which was very high and they wanted to
eliminate that.

Akhil Gupta from IIT Bombay is the Chief Tech & Product Officer of NoBroker. He was an
engineer at Oracle, and the technical lead at PeopleFluent, a Software-as-a-Service talent
management solutions provider.

Amit Agarwal is the CEO of NoBroker. He has had several stints; he was an analyst with
Cognizant,a principal consultant at PwC, and the associate director at Australia New Zealand
Bank Group. He is a graduate from IIT Kanpur.

Saurabh Garg alumnus of IIT Bombay is the CBO of NoBroker. He's the co-founder and
director of The Four Fountains Spa.

The idea came from experiences with brokers and the unavailability of a favorable solution.
NoBroker was founded because the co-founders (Agarwal and Akhil Gupta of IIT Bombay)
believed that paying hefty brokerage wasn't necessary for finding a new home. The
possibility of the company was considered in late 2013 and the site was propelled in March
2014. It is a shared site that permits property holders and planned occupants to interface
straightforwardly, disposing of the requirement for an agent. It offers a membership model
for occupants just as the owners.

Product and Services

The company also introduced a crowdsourcing feature through which users can put up rental
listings. Here any landlord can click the picture of their flat or the property and get it listed or
anyone who seethe TO-LET board with the genuine owner detail can upload it in the website
and when the conversion will happen then they will pay for it to the person who uploads it.

They have analysed the entire value chain of house hunting and replaced everything that a
broker does with the help of technology, a differentiation from other online real estate portals.
It gives smart recommendations to customers based on real-time data and assists in informed
decision making.

Listing or finding a property is very easy, the user has to give a missed call or leave a
WhatsApp message for property listing. An executive then calls and helps him/her list the
property to verify the details. Potential tenants can then go through listings using specific
search options and filters. They can then directly contact the landlord to close the deal. One
can also make custom rental agreements on NoBroker. The portal has gone as far as
removing certain listings that discriminated on gender and religion.

They have total as of now seven verticals, some of them are packers and movers, door-step
services and loan facilitator, NoBrokerHOOD etc.

Competitors
Some of the main players in the market are: SoftBank backed Housing.com, and PropTiger
(which has received funding from News Corp) are the top rivals. Other competitors include
99Acres, Quikr, Magicbricks.

Challenges Faced
The brokerage industry in India if we see is very vast and the people here pay them easily,
after this start-up started the founders of this company started getting threatening calls and
legal notice from the brokers to quit and stop the business. But the founders found that the
start-up is having great potential so they continued and in 2015 the start-up is attacked by
some of the brokers and the property agents which made them shift the office they did it
because NoBroker idea was hampering their business.

They thought that shifting the office will make everything smooth but it did not happen and
the same thing continued, now the NoBroker is not affected by the brokers in the listing as
every details of the property and the listing person is verified. Many web portals came by
giving the promise that they will not encourage the brokers but they cannot stop the brokers
from entering into their site, but here they were able to come out of this situation and make it
a success and broker free platform.

Revenue Model
NoBroker generates revenue in two ways:

First, by attracting advertisements from furniture start-ups (it claims 2.5 million user visits
per month). They offer services such as connecting tenants with movers and packers, and
drafting rental agreements.

NoBroker began monetizing its service using a freemium package: for tenants, the
subscription starts from Rs 999 which provides 25 leads, while the Rs 1,999 plan comes up
with a relationship manager. The company also supplies the required legal documents which

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are customized for each rental agreement and are then sent directly to the tenant’s address, be
it a weekday or weekend. It is far more flexible than broker-led agreements that require a
pain-staking visit for the tenant to the broker’s office during the week. For owners, NoBroker
offers a similar plan starting at Rs 2,999. It also has a freemium model with basic features,
but now that is also chargeable in some other way.

Growth
Now a days if we see top three real estate site NoBroker comes under top 3 so we can tell that
the business is running successful, the company claims that they have saved brokerage more
than 55crores monthly, they are connected to more than Rs10 lakh customers every month.
Every month they are getting 60000+ listings. They came up with a mobile app. In the last 12
months the customer base increased massively from 35000 to 650000. They now aim to
cover 70% of the market as real estate business mostly depends on the brand advertising,
promotion of the company and lead generation but this company is not from it. They raised
$10 million Series B funding to expand to expand its operation to 20 cities Mumbai,
Bangalore, Pune, Chennai, and Gurgaon. The first target is the Noida, Delhi, Kolkata,
Hyderabad, and Ahmedabad. They are currently in series D funding.

Future Plans
NoBroker has immediate plans of expanding within India, but it also has its eyes set on the
overseas market. The company has a firm belief in expansion as the path to reap dividends.

Current Scenario
 They have raised $51 million investment by General Atlantic
 Recently they have again raised investment of $50 million by Tiger Global
Management.
 NoBroker has raised $121 million, including the latest round
 They are now currently valuing at nearly $300 to $350 million

Recommendation

 The changing customer needs, tastes and preferences can act as an opportunity if the
business organisation has good market knowledge and customer base and the details
about the market as in the property and all and about the proper owner
 The emergence of e-commerce and social media marketing as a trend can help they to
grow much more faster than any competitor in the market.
 The emergence of new market segments and new niches provide business so they can
come up with new idea to attract more customers and adopt new strategy like they did.
and
 Improvement in the customers- lifestyle and standards mean more consumption on
consumer goods and services, and more opportunities to encourage the purchase.

 The globalisation pushes the organisation to cross national boundaries so they can
focus on the areas which are not tapped.

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