The boy from Jammu & Kashmir who started Housing – and then bid goodbye

A picturesque old town with rivers, orchards, and flowers nestled against the mighty Himalayas. That’s Jammu in India’s northernmost state of Jammu and Kashmir. It’s stunningly beautiful but the area is in the news almost always for the wrong reasons.

Plagued by communal politics, you often hear about bomb blasts, refugee camps, and thoughtless slaughter. You read about youngsters – torn between beauty and the beastly – straying into terrorism, picking up AK-47 rifles, ready to kill. But the hero of this story strayed into something else altogether.

The hustle and bustle of India’s financial capital was a novel experience for him.

Meet Advitiya Sharma, co-founder of Housing – the Mumbai-based real estate portal on which Japan’s SoftBank bet US$90 million. Yesterday, Advitiya left the startup he founded after a series of controversies. This is the backstory of the meteoric rise of this young entrepreneur before his denouement.

Housing began as a rental search platform in Mumbai. It now offers everything from youth hostels and paying guest accommodation to new housing projects, plots of land, legal agreements online, and even home loans across 50 Indian cities. Most of all, it pioneered the use of mobile map-based technology to locate and verify the listings on its site.

Real estate is often a mug’s game in India, but tech-based portals like Housing are helping to change that.

The real world outside college walls

Teenager Advitiya stepped out of Jammu to a different world in Mumbai when he joined Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay to study engineering. The hustle and bustle of India’s financial capital, brimming with migrants, was a novel experience for him. The IIT campus with brilliant techies from all over the country became a sanctuary where he connected with several like-minded friends.

It was in the final semester at college that he got a real dose of Mumbai. He knew he would have to move out of the college hostel soon, and decided to find an apartment for rent.

What he promised and what I saw were completely different.

Almost immediately he found an ad for a three-bedroom apartment in the Bandra area for just INR 15,000 (US$237) per month. “I couldn’t believe my luck. Imagine, living on the same street as Bollywood movie stars. I fell for it,” Advitiya recalls.

Bandra is one of the most expensive localities in Mumbai. One-bedroom flats cost over INR 100,000 (US$1,600) per month in rent. But Advitiya had never house-hunted before, and so naively believed the real estate broker who had advertised. “I called up the broker. He said he had found a tenant for the apartment that very morning, but had several more such properties for rent. ‘Come on over,’ he told me, and I set out to find that dream home. But, what he promised and what I saw were completely different,” Advitiya recalls.

Run-down flats in cramped streets, musty rooms with no natural light, all atrociously expensive – that was all he found after tiring days of house-hunting. And that experience turned out to be life-altering.

Everybody with whom he discussed this problem told him about their own bad experiences. Many had seen much worse. “This seemed like a big problem worth solving,” Advitiya says. He and a bunch of college friends put their heads together and Housing was born.

Feet on the street with a DSLR camera

A million dollar name

…And then there were nine