Real estate start-up NoBroker.com has raised $210 million Series E funding at a $1 billion valuation, 2.5 times the company’s last valuation of $400 million in March 2020.

The funding round was led by General Atlantic, Tiger Global Management and Moore Strategic Ventures. With this fundraise, the total funding raised by NoBroker has touched $361 million.

Upward trend in home buying

NoBroker’s Cofounder and Chief Business Officer, Saurabh Garg, told BusinessLine , “In the past 18-20 months, NoBroker has transformed from a pure real estate-transaction marketplace to a one-stop shop. So, apart from people finding a house to rent, buy or sell on NoBroker, people can now do a gambit of things including rent agreements, packers and movers, home loans, interiors, and pay rent. Our society management solution NoBrokerHood gives us access to a premium user base.”

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He added that in the last 1-1.5 years, there has been an upward trend in people buying and selling houses. NoBroker has seen an almost 100 per cent jump in people buying houses in the last one year. Garg believes this to be a multi-year upwards cycle in which people who were earlier not buying homes, especially millennials, are now doing so.

All these factors together are said to have contributed to the jump in NoBroker’s valuation.

Four segments

Started as a real estate marketplace, NoBroker.com today has four segments — renting/buying houses (NoBroker), home services (packers and movers, painters, cleaners), financial services (NoBroker Pay), and society management (NoBrokerHood).

Of these, the company’s real estate services contribute 50-55 per cent to overall revenue, and home services and financial services contribute 20-25 per cent each.

“NoBrokerHood is pre-revenue right now. We believe that it will act as a funnel which will feed into NoBroker in terms of bringing customers for its real estate, home services, or financial services,” Garg added.

Deepen presence

NoBroker will use this funding to deepen its presence in the six cities where it already has a presence — Bengaluru, Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad and Delhi-NCR — and to further launch in the top-50 cities in the next 2-3 years. In all the new cities that NoBroker will expand into, the company will be launched as a one-stop shop.

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The company will also invest extensively in product and tech.

Garg said that the company wants to expand NoBrokerHood from 10,000 societies to 1 lakh societies in the next 2-3 years.

Growth over profitability

Garg said, “If we want to be profitable, we can be profitable now. But right now we are investing in growth. In any city that we are in, we are trying to grow faster and make them bigger. Because we don’t want to be a small and profitable company, we want to be a large and very profitable company.”

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However, he added that NoBroker should become profitable at the company level in the next 2-3 years.

Customer-first mindset

NoBroker was founded by Akhil Gupta, Amit Kumar Agarwal and Saurabh Garg in 2013 and has raised funding from marquee investors such as General Atlantic, Tiger Global, Elevation Capital, Moore Capital, Beenext and KTB Ventures. Vijay Shekhar Sharma and Anand Chandrasekaran are also angel investors in the company. More than 75 lakh properties are said to be already registered on the platform and more than 1.6 crore individuals have used its services

Shantanu Rastogi, Managing Director, General Atlantic, said, “NoBroker’s digital-first approach to efficiently solve renting, buying, maintenance and related needs for real-estate owners, tenants, buyers, residential societies and developers is paradigm-shifting. Focused execution with a customer-first mindset bodes well for NoBroker’s continued penetration in this market. In the future, NoBroker’s product stack will also find relevance in several under-regulated developing markets around the world.”

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