Housing bounces back, acquires startup to help builders with customer support

Indian real estate site Housing today announced that it acquired HomeBuy360, a sales cycle management platform for real estate developers. The deal is worth US$2 million.

The communication between real estate developers and builders post-sale in India was manual, ineffective, and broken. The builders often fail to provide customer care. Rajat Kothari, Kshitij Minglani, and A K Gururaj launched Homebuy360 in 2011 to solve that.

The startup manages all the interactions and transactions between builders and buyers while saving administration costs for developers and improving customer care. It helps in managing leads and bookings, creating documents, sending emails and SMS notifications, and handling buyer grievances, among other back-office tasks. Home buyers get an update at every stage of the construction process.

HomeBuy360 application provides builders personalized logins through which they can monitor construction updates, documentation, payment alerts, and receipts, project photographs, customer grievances, buyer referrals, and bank connect. Buyers are also given a secured login address.

Interestingly, HomeBuy360 had also set up HomeFind360, which was similar to Housing. It helped users hunt for homes based on criteria like budget and prefered area and also provided information on schools, hospitals, companies, and metro stations located near the property. However, it later shifted focus to HomeBuy360 and retained the HomeFind360 site to allow developers to manually publish listings for better visibility.

Homebuy360 claims to have partnered with 70 developers.

“Developers are key stakeholders to drive efficiency in the Indian real estate sector. Our vision is that every developer uses Homebuy360 to bring down their sales and operating costs,” Housing’s interim CEO and COO Rishabh Gupta, said. There are about 20,000 developers in India.

“With less than 10 percent of developers using CRM for their back end and customer connect operations, we have a huge market opportunity ahead of us. Housing’s strong developer network pan India will allow us to further scale our business nationally,” Kothari said.

Besides adding revenues, the acquisition will also fortify Housing’s data science lab with data on inventory and transactions in the real estate sector. Housing had earlier acquired Indian Real Estate Forum (IREF), a community platform for property-related discussions and Realty BI to provide real estate related risk analysis to property buyers and financial institutions.

1 million mark