Real estate platform Nobroker.com is on an aggressive hiring mode to support demand spike since the beginning of the month. The brokerage-free platform is ramping up its team with 130 additional hires across technology, operations, business, marketing and customer facing roles, a top executive told BusinessLine .

“When the lockdown was announced in the fourth week of March, we were faced with two options – to go defensive with salary cuts and layoffs or to adopt the aggressive approach by retaining our employees and hiring more people to support the growth of our existing and new streams of revenue that we continue to identify. We decided to go with the second approach. We are adding 30 new people to our 300-strong core team and 100 to our 1,200-strong call centre team. And this is the right time to hire good talent, because a lot of companies have laid off their employees in order to keep their heads above the waters,” said Amit Agarwal, Co-founder and CEO, NoBroker.com.

Demand for home rentals

“We have started seeing a lot of pent up demand for home rentals and commercial rentals in the six cities that we operate in including Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Pune, Delhi and NCR since May 1. In the last seven days alone, demand has spiked by 20 per cent, especially in Bengaluru where pent up demand is high with lockdown restrictions being eased since May 4,” said Agarwal.

The company’s revenues have been growing 3X year-on-year in the last few years. Its Bengaluru and Mumbai operations are fully profitable. After identifying its core proposition of home rentals, commercial rentals was added on as another revenue stream soon after. Today, the company participates in the entire user journey starting from house search to packers & movers, home loans, home painting and cleaning services, legal and insurance services, among others.

“Pre-Covid we attracted 7 lakh unique customer interactions every month, which has halved to 3.5 lakh interactions during the lockdown. However, since prices are down, because of the pandemic, the intention to buy and sell ready-to-move-into homes is high. People who postponed their home purchase decisions until they had time to research properties had enough time to finish their research during the lockdown, as they are working from home. This buy and sell demand is from end users, not from investors,” said Agarwal.

Founded by Akhil Gupta, Amit Agarwal and Saurabh Garg, NoBroker.com is working towards streamlining the country’s largely unorganised real estate industry.

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