Housing.com Set To Raise Over $35 Mn From Softbank & Existing Investors

Online real estate portal, Housing, is set  to raise $35 Mn in a new round of funding to be led by Japan’s Softbank. The startup plans to use the funds in revenue generating areas like advertisement-based business and increase its base in other cities.

The startup is reportedly valued at around $347 Mn (INR 2260 Cr.). During the last fundraise, Housing was valued at around $230 Mn (INR 1500 Cr.).

Data on SimilarWeb shows drastic fall in monthly visits on the website, which has fallen from 14 Mn to 2.6 Mn.

Apart from Japan’s Softbank (that’s holds 32% stake in Housing), its existing investors including Nexus Partners and Helion are also expected to participate in the new fund raising. Till date, the three-year old startup has raised $145 Mn. In the last round, it raised $90 Mn from SoftBank Group. The firms used the fund to increase base in 300 cities, product development and strategic acquisitions.

Recently, Housing launched a new branding product called Brand Falcon, a branding and communication tool for real estate developers. Last month, it acquired HomeBuy360, a cloud-based sales lifecycle management platform for $2 Mn. It acqui-hired Plat, an online network for agents enabling them to share real estate inventories and requirements and BigBHK, a property management software (PMS) targeted at rental suppliers. A month before that, it had acquired Realty Business Intelligence and Indian Real Estate Forum (IREF) in March 2015.

Interestingly, in June, it was in radar of classified major Quikr for a possible acquisition. The deal, however, fell through and Quikr started talks with Commonfloor.

Housing was started in 2012 by IITK dropout Rahul Yadav, who was later asked to leave the company following a disagreement with the investors and an ugly spat on the social network. The startup promoted their COO, Rishabh Gupta as interim CEO. Since then, it changed its business focus to consolidate into buying and renting space. Earlier this week, it appointed Mani Rangarajan as the CFO of the company.

Housing.com competes with large online portal like 99Acres, MagicBricks, Makaan.com, Indiaproperty and startups like Commonfloor, Grabhouse, Nestaway, Nobroker and more.

While Quikr is said to gulp down a majority stake in Commonfloor for $50 Mn, Grabhouse raised Series B funding of $10 Mn from existing investors, Sequoia Capital and Kalaari Capital, who had earlier invested $2.5 Mn.

According to Tracxn report, in June 2015, over $1Bn has been invested in last 5 years in online rental space.

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