This startup is trying to fix house hunting in India – the right way

Photo credit: José Antonio Morcillo Valenciano.

When the two founders of housing portal Grabhouse launched their startup, they had a specific question in mind.

Would technology make finding housing in India easier? Or were startups missing the mark and just introducing a new way to recreate the same old issues – at scale?

Of course, that’s not the story they usually tell the public. Pankhuri Shrivastava and Prateek Shukla were Teach for India fellows living off a stipend and barely making ends meet in India’s most expensive city, Mumbai. They tried finding houses, apartments, even roommates, but nothing worked, and that’s where Grabhouse started.

And yet, despite how relatable the story is, it’s not just a coincidence that the problems that irked them also came with a huge and untapped market.

“It’s supposed to be a billion dollar market, and we saw that less than one percent of it was getting tapped into [by anyone],” Prateek says. “When we decided to go through the revenues of how much people were making, we realized nobody was actually capturing it.”

The main reason for this, he insinuates, is that the industry can be deceiving from the outside.

On one end, there’s a new generation of liberal young Indians getting jobs across the country, moving into cities, and breaking norms to do things differently. They’re the type to use a startup online to find their next home or roommate.

On the other end are homeowners, a vastly different demographic. It’s terrifying to rent your home out to a random person and the anonymity of the internet doesn’t help a startup’s case. Plus, brokers have worked just fine until now. Why should they change?

“Nobody was looking at the problem the right way,” he says, which includes the other big player in the space, SoftBank-backed Housing.com.

Grabhouse has raised US$13 million across four rounds from investors like Kalaari Capital and Sequoia to try and look at it properly. While it’s far from having captured the market, it at least seems to have gotten the right attitude down: keep your eyes open and don’t get stagnant.

Offline to online, online to offline

Photo credit: Ralf Kayser.

Grabhouse started as a matchmaking tool to find like-minded and compatible roommates. Sounds simple, but that first step opened up a Pandora’s box.

Bad press