Finding accommodation can be really exhausting, especially for students and bachelors. Home-owners usually seek out families as their tenants, driving the singletons to expensive brokers. But finding decent accommodation in any of the major cities in India without a broker is next to impossible. Rents are sky-high for all the decent places and lower-priced flats are usually in a sorry state. Moreover, many students and young professionals are moving to new cities or neighborhoods where they don’t have any friends who can help them find a place. Indian startup CommonFloor now has an app called Flatchat that might be the answer.
Flatchat is a mobile-only app that lets flat-owners and flatmates connect with potential flat-seekers, without going through the hassles of dealing with brokers. By creating their profiles on Flatchat, all these stakeholders can connect with each other based on their requirements. For example, if a seeker is looking for a flat in the Malviya Nagar area of New Delhi within a specific budget, he/she can connect with a few other folks looking for a flat with similar specifications, form a group, and get a place together.
In another scenario, Flatchat connects the flat-seekers with tenants looking for flatmates or with the flat-owners directly. Users can screen each other’s profiles and chat with the ones who match their criteria, exchange numbers and take the negotiations forward.
It even has a feature called the Flatchat assistant. This is a human who answers user queries and offers recommendations accordingly. Flatchat is currently available for users in Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi-NCR, Pune, Chennai and Hyderabad.
The journey from portal to app
Flatchat was born out of Flat.to, a portal founded by Gaurav Munjal, Hemesh Singh, and Aakrit Vaish. Flat.to was a real estate portal that helped bachelors and students find flats and paying guest accommodations in major cities across India. After it got acquired by CommonFloor, Vaish left the company to found Haptik, and Munjal and Singh decided to drop work on the portal entirely and focus on its companion app, Flatchat. The association with CommonFloor has led to a lot of operational integration between the two companies and Flatchat garners a lot of feedback from CommonFloor’s portal to ensure the smooth operation of the app.
Munjal believes that people prefer using apps to access various services now and therefore decided to go app-only. “Portals are a boring model. We realized that after we launched our app. The traction that we received in one year with our portal was garnered within a month by our app. People were using Facebook groups for seeking flats and tenants more than our portal.”
Last week Flatchat got US$2.5 million from CommonFloor for hiring purposes and establishing presence in cities across India with a higher population of students and bachelors. CommonFloor itself has plenty of money to burn, having raised US$10.5 million in series D funding from Tiger Global management and Accel Partners and US$30 million in series E funding from Tiger Global. Earlier this year, it raised funding from Google Capital.
A flat no to brokers
Munjal claims that all measures have been taken to ensure a safe and trustworthy platform. “There are strong security mechanisms in place to ensure a safe environment. Users can chat with each other only after sending chat invites. If a homeowner wants to chat with a seeker, he can send an invite to the seeker, who in turn can scrutinize the owner’s profile for any discrepancies and accept the invite if everything is in order. In case a user comes across a shady or fake profile, it can be reported or blocked.”
On a number of real estate portals, brokers pose as home-owners in order to attract seekers. Flatchat claims to provide a completely broker-free platform. “We have a strong monitoring mechanism. If anybody uses keyword like broker, property, or any broker-specific lingo, our system will notify us. We have zero tolerance for such users and that particular profile is immediately taken down. We even apologize to the all users whom the alleged broker has contacted.”
Talking about the company’s revenue generation model, Munjal states, “We plan to monetize from the supply side [and] start charging the accommodation owners a subscription fee.” The company plans to implement this model and focus on monetization in the future, but for now it’s working on hitting the target of one million users. It also plans to expand internationally in the next three to six months.
Accommodating competition
There are a number of broker-free house-hunting portals operating in the student/bachelor accommodation space. Zocalo.in is one such portal that operates in Delhi NCR and Mumbai. Its app, also named Zocalo.in, is available for Delhi NCR users only. Eezyrent is another portal currently operating only in the Mumbai region.
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