Real estate portal Housing expands to Bangalore

Real estate portal Housing, which currently lists flats for rental and buying in four Indian cities, has expanded its operation to Bangalore.

The portal, which started as a flat rental services platform in Mumbai, recently opened offices in Pune, Gurgaon and Hyderabad.

"Bangalore is the IT hub of India and more people are migrating to the city for jobs. Given this huge migrant population and high internet penetration, we decided to expand our service to Bangalore," co-founder Advitiya Sharma told Techcircle.in. "Hopefully, Bangalore is going to be a big shot for us."

The development was first reported by Techcrunch.

Housing was set up in 2012 by a group from IIT Bombay. It enables real estate brokers to upload unlimited listings on the site while users can search properties for free. The portal added the 'buy' option only a couple of months ago (which means flats up for sale are also listed here). The venture is owned and operated by Mumbai-based Locon Solutions Pvt Ltd. It currently has 30 IIT graduates on board.

Early this week, the firm secured $2.5 million in pre-Series A funding from Nexus Venture Partners. It also received two rounds of angel funding from various investors, including Haresh Chawla, former Network18 CEO; and Zishaan Hayath, co-founder of the phone commerce company Chaupaati Bazaar, which was acquired by Kishore Biyani's Future Group a couple of years ago.

The startup has also set up a data science lab (DSL) to leverage the real estate data collected by the Housing team to provide insights and research reports to consumers.

Compared with other leading real estate portals in India, Housing's interface is more user friendly and it has made searching easy. However, the real estate market is getting crowded and the company will face stiff competition from Sulekha Property, Times Group's Magicbricks.com, Info Edge's 99acres.com, Indiaproperty.com and Makaan.com, besides some other recent entrants like Proptiger.com and Commonfloor.com.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)