‘Housing.com is meeting or exceeding every metric’

Jason Kothari came on board online real-estate portal Housing.com as Chief Business Officer in August 2015 with the mandate of chalking out the company’s long-term strategy and growth plans. Later in November, he was elevated as Chief Executive Officer, with an add-on mandate of turning around the loss-making firm. After shutting down ancillary verticals, and now with no further restructuring on the anvil, Kothari told BusinessLine in a tête-à-tête that Housing.com continues to be a technology company offering solutions for home buyers. Now, with about 900 employees, the Mumbai-headquartered company is close to raising its next round of funding, even as it is on track to be profitable in the next 18-24 months. Edited excerpts:

How has the journey over the last seven months been and what changes did you make during this time?

The changes we made in one year are what other companies took a few years to make. To start with, we evaluated business models around the world, particularly in China, which is the most comparable market to India.

We also hired experts and studied all our competitors closely, not just at the top level, but all the way to the ground. We established a new focused business model for the company — an online-to-offline transactions firm focused on buying and selling homes. Secondly, we revamped our management team, and hired people with strong professional and entrepreneurial experience.

Housing’s co-founders have been leaving the firm one after another and now has just four of the original founders remaining. How did this impact the business?

It hasn’t affected our business at all. The founders played a critical role earlier in the company’s lifecycle and created a lot of value. Now we are in a different stage; we are a mature company run by a diverse team of professionals and entrepreneurs, who are mostly second- or third-time entrepreneurs. It was a mutual decision for the co-founders to leave and focus on building their next dream.

On your plans to strengthen the company and turn it profitable…

We are meeting or exceeding every metric. We have cut our costs by 70 per cent, revenues have risen 200 per cent month-on-month, and are on track to achieve $10 million in revenues in this financial year.

Our traffic has gone up by 250 per cent, from 1 million visits per month to 3.5 million visits per month, while we have increased our supply and now have five lakh homes active on our site.

Our page views are at 9.3 per user versus the industry average of 5 per user, and we have the lowest bounce rate of 31 per cent versus the industry average of 44 per cent. We are on track to be profitable in the next 18-24 months.

You have also sounded off investors and are looking to raise further capital…

As of date, we have raised $140 million. The capital we require going forward is relatively small compared with that. A lot of financial and strategic investors have approached us to invest in the company, and we are evaluating the options. We plan to raise the next funding in a few months.

Earlier, you had closed down some of your business to focus on buying and selling. Are there further restructuring on the anvil?

We closed down a lot of ancillary verticals as the company was originally involved in land, rent, short stays, paying guests and a number of different other business. We temporarily closed those down to focus on buying and selling, which is the largest and most lucrative business in this space. The real-estate market is about $120 billion this year, of which 80 per cent is residential, and a majority of that is buying and selling homes. There are no further restructuring plans.

Housing, when it commenced operations, was a tech company offering solutions for home buying? Now, are you looking at shedding that image?

We are still very much a technology company in every respect. In the long-term, we see ourselves as the most trusted place for real estate in India and in the near-term, we see ourselves as the most trusted place to buy and sell homes in India. At present, nowhere in the world, real-estate transactions happen on a large scale purely online, but it will happen in the future. So, we need to have some offline presence too.

Where do you see the company in the next five years?

In the next five years, we see ourselves as the most trusted and popular place to buy and sell homes in the country. Using our technology and DNA, we will be able to solve a lot of the pain points that exist right now in the country and we will be able to provide a lot of selections of home, most accurate data per home, pass on our customers to the best brokers in the country; and we really see ourselves making a large impact on this industry.

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