Housing war heats up in India as CommonFloor acquires social app Bakfy to go all out on mobile

The next battle of the online real estate war in India will be fought on mobile. CommonFloor, a leader of the space, just added fresh ammunition to its war chest: anonymous social network app for Indian students Bakfy. This young startup was acqui-hired for its three co-founders Ashutosh Garg, Rajesh Eswarlal, and Niranjan Bala who are experts in the mobile networking space.

Garg, Eswarlal, and Bala will join CommonFloor as entrepreneurs-in-residence. “We will work directly with CommonFloor founders Sumit Jain, Lalit Mangal, and Vikas Malpani, to build social and mobile products,” Ashutosh Garg says.

The Bakfy app is a combination of Twitter, Facebook, and Secret. It lets college students share complaints, gossip, and chat with one another anonymously. Users can sign up using their Facebook ID, and pick an anonymous user name on Bakfy. They don’t have to add friends or follow anyone like on most other social networks. The name of their college will be appended to their anonymous posts. This app addressed a need for privacy among college students who hate to go on record about their opinions about their college, studies, and friends.

Tech in Asia wrote about Bakfy two months ago just as they sprouted wings. The Bakfy team was looking to raise funding then, and met the CommonFloor founders at a hackathon. “We got talking there. Sumit and Lalit loved our ideas, and surprisingly, made an acquisition offer to us,” Garg recalls. He confirmed to Tech in Asia that the acquisition is a cash plus equity deal. The figures are confidential though.

Post acquisition, Garg, Eswarlal, and Bala will focus entirely on CommonFloor but will not shut down the Bakfy app – “we do have thousands of active users.”

Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee graduates Sumit Jain and Lalit Mangal started CommonFloor in December 2007 with another techie friend Vikas Malpani. Initially, it was meant to be an online space where people living in large apartment complexes could interact and collaborate to solve problems they had in common. It grew into a real estate portal when people started posting their houses for rent or sale on the platform. But its key differentiator is still the community platform where house-owners, property seekers, and tenants connect, interact, and solve issues. For instance, a prospective buyer can send out a query on amenities, child safety, or any other aspect of living in a particular apartment complex, and she is likely to get responses from people actually living there.

In that sense, CommonFloor too is a social network. Seen from that perspective, the acquisition of Bakfy is a good fit with CommonFloor’s culture. “The helpful, community nature is our core value and it is something we will have to keep our eyes on while we scale.” Sumit Jain, co-founder of CommonFloor, told Tech in Asia in an earlier interview when it raised US$30 million.

CommonFloor’s main rival is Mumbai-based Housing, which recently raised US$90 million from Japan’s SoftBank. It pioneered the use of mobile map-based technology to locate and verify the property listings.

See: What makes this Indian real estate portal uncommon