Housing Lays Off Over 200 Employees As It Restructures to Focus on New Strategy for Home Buyers

Real-estate portal, Housing.com has laid off 200 employees as it restructures & shifts its focus on its home-buying and selling segment, according to our sources. However, this has not been confirmed by the company. This layoff is also meant to drive further efficiencies across the company. With this development, the company will be reorganising its teams to execute this new strategy.

Commenting on this, Jason Kothari, CEO, Housing.com said, “Housing will now be laser focused on solving the pain points in home buying and selling. And, we are excited about the potential impact our solutions could have on consumers, developers and agents across the country. We will be reorganising the company to fit this new focused strategy and, to this end, expect to reduce our workforce.“

“We value the contributions of Housing’s talented team and will do everything to support its departing team members,” said Jason.

Earlier this month, the startup was looking to let go of 200 employees from product and marketing team, to control its cash burn and meet the tightened cost targets set by its shareholders.

In July (2015), the co-founder & CEO of Housing, Rahul Yadav, had also been fired. The board believed that his behaviour was not befitting of a CEO and is detrimental to the company. Also, three months back, when the company shut down few of its departments, including commercial properties, short stays and land business, it had fired 600 employees.

Despite all the hassle, Housing has been building its business since past few months.

Here are few of its developments:

Added senior management team, including Mani Rangarajan (CFO), Nikhil Rungta (CMO), Nandini Mehta (General Counsel), Abhishek Hota (Chief of Staff) and Keerthi Kiran (VP-New Real Estate Projects).
Formed a strategic multi-year partnership with MCHI and CREDAI, a real estate developer body
Launched a marketing platform for premier real estate developers called BRAND FALCON
Created virtual real estate expo, gaining 60,000 home buyers

Here are few other startups that have recently joined the layoff squad:

November 16, 2015: Noida-based video micro-blogging platform, Frankly.me laid off close to 30 employees – about 40% of its team, as the company pivots its business model
November 16, 2015: LocalOye, an online platform to book services online, laid off 60 employees as part of a restructuring effort
November 5,2015: Online food ordering startup, TinyOwl, laid off 112 employees from Chennai, Pune, Hyderabad and Delhi, and decided to shut operations in these four cities
November 6, 2015: Bangalore-based Digital CRM company, Vizury laid off about 50 employees across five cities
October 17, 2015: Zomato laid off 300 employees to shift focus to transaction-based business
October 12, 2015: Chat-based personal assistant app Helpchat fired over 100 employees. The company said it was not an unusual layoff, but part of the ongoing business transformation
September 8, 2015: Online food ordering startup TinyOwl Technology Pvt Ltd laid off over 160 employees in Pune and Bangalore