How one woman’s fight through India’s male-led realty industry led to startup acquisition

Priya Maheshwari, founder of Properji

It’s late when I interview Priya Maheshwari, but that’s how she prefers it – she works best when she’s burning the midnight oil. Besides, striving for new challenges may well be something that runs in her family.

“I have this dinner conversation with my daughter,” she tells me. “Maybe one day, I’ll get my Ph.D. My daughter is six years old, and when she’s 18, I’ll be 50. I will do my Ph.D [while] she does her undergrad.”

For now, it’s something of a joke. That time is still a ways off, but Priya is certainly not short of success for the moment. A few weeks ago, realty company MagicBricks, one of the larger real estate portals in India, acquired her company Properji, a move that had been in the works for quite some time.

I could sense that the real estate sector was very, very male-dominated.

Priya, who grew up in a conservative small town family in Rajasthan, conceived of the startup just four years ago when she moved back to India from the Bay Area. She has 10 years experience working in international business and management and had been working with Black & Veatch in San Francisco and New York. In India, she witnessed firsthand how messy the process of buying a house was in the country.

“There was a lot of information on different listing sites or from brokers who push you to buy property because they’re on commission, but there was no detail or in-depth comparison on the different listing sites available,” the UPenn graduate explains. An unbiased comparison seemed to be up to the buyer.

Priya thought differently.

In August 2013, she began doing her own unbiased research reports on different properties and handing them out free of charge to people to see if that was something they wanted. She would do her own research from publically available information. The result was a strong positive response – not just from customers but from builders as well. Customers wanted the reports to help with their purchases, and builders wanted to look good on paper.

“Companies used to call and ask why their scoring was so low,” she says. The tech behind the scoring used methods based on information that was readily available, so she suggested they put out more information about themselves. The builders sent her the information.

In August 2014, Properji’s site was up, and customers could submit their payments online for reports on different properties in Bangalore. They were trying to figure out how they could scale their company. Not even half a year later in January, Priya got an email from MagicBricks asking for a pilot – 50 reports that MagicBricks would use to test how Properji’s model could be applied to other businesses. A good working relationship turned into an acquisition.

The gender gap

More than 85 percent of the real estate industry employees in India are male, and Priya often felt this gender gap.

Steps forward