Housing tries to reverse its cash burn through acquisitions

Housing, one of the hottest startups in India, is notorious for its high cash burn. Last year, the company reported a loss of US$8 million against a revenue of merely US$300,000. However, it has recently taken tough steps to pull up its socks.

It sacked 600 employees as it shut down a few non-core segments like commercial properties, short stays, and land businesses. It is also adding new revenue streams through acquisitions. The latest ones are Plat, a networking app for real estate agents, and BigBHK, which develops property management software.

Earlier, it acquired Homebuy360, a sales cycle management platform for real estate developers.

Plat is an online network for agents to share real estate inventories and requirements. Housing launched a similar app for agents to find leads or properties shared by other agents last month. The startup claims to have 10,000 downloads.

With Plat, Housing strengthens its technology know-how to cater to the agent community. “This will help drive efficiencies in communications and operations such as posting leads and enhancing the property showcase experience, thereby closing deals faster,” an official statement from the company reads.

BigBHK, on the other hand, helps manage property portfolios with management software. Some of its features include rental accounting, e-invoicing, record management, complaint tracking, reports, and inventory management. It can help track rent dues and collect maintenance fee on a monthly basis.

With these acquisitions, Chitransh Sahai, Gautam Prem Jain, Ayush Lodhi, and Ankit Aggarwal from Plat and Ankur Kumar and Atul Yadav from BigBHK have joined the Housing team. They are engineers who graduated from premier institutes like Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and BITS Pilani. The buy-outs are acqui-hires.

“The acqui-hires with Plat and BigBHK add immensely to our talent pool, which will help better manage property portfolio ensuring convenience and transparency,” Housing CEO and COO Rishabh Gupta says. “This is in line with our strategy moving forward of focusing on the core of our business.”

The deal size remains undisclosed.

Balancing act

Among Housing’s other acquisitions are Indian Real Estate Forum (IREF), a community platform for property-related discussions and Realty BI, which provides real estate related risk analysis to property buyers and financial institutions.

To balance its books, Housing plans to cease operations in smaller cities and focus on revenue-generation and building an advertisement business in large cities and towns.