Online real estate platform and rental provider NoBroker has raised another $7 million, or Rs 50 crores through investments byKTB Network and existing investors- SAIF Partners,BEENEXT&Digital Garage. KTB is the venture capital arm of the South Korean major KTB Network. Early this year, KTB had expressed interest in investing in Indian growth stage start-ups and now it seems to have made good on that assurance. This move is also a major boost to the ‘Make in India‘ campaign.
The Economic Times quoted Chun Soo Kim, team manager for investment screening at KTB saying,”India’s domestic market is large, it is growing and has a very young population. We are happy to look at any Indian startup which has expertise in the area and is innovating to disrupt the status quo.”With this new round of funding, the total Series B funding in this round received by NoBroker goes up to $17 million or Rs 122 crores. NoBroker currently has a major presence in big cities like Bengaluru, Chennai and Pune.Amit Agarwal, CEO & Co- Founder, NoBroker.com,said,“This is special because this is the first time that a Korean fund has led the funding round for an Indian startup. Their Korean start-up experiences will help us further with innovative ideas so that we can continue to grow exponentially. We are in an excellent position now in terms of customer growth and financials. Global(sic) network of KTB will also aid us in our future global ambitions.”
South Korean firm KTB Ventures makes its Indian investment debut with INR 50 cr in@nobrokercom. #MakeInIndiahttps://t.co/R87h2qmdkV
— Make in India (@makeinindia) December 19, 2016
NoBroker is essentially a C2C platform, with customers seeking to rent properties directly and without any broker. Hence the name. User specifications will get them the kind of property they want. The revenue comes mainly from subscription charges, typically starting at Rs 1,999 paid by customers up front looking to rent out properties.NoBroker has served 1.5 million customerstill date, making it the world’s largest C2C real estate platform. NoBroker is adding more than 1 lakh new registered customers on a monthly basis now and witnessing 5 lakh customer connections eachmonth which results in a saving of more than 20 crores of brokerage monthly, according to this report. NoBroker.com recently moved to a freemium subscription-fee based model and has been growing revenues aggressively. The platform has a distinctly Indian feel and is an ideal campaign face for ‘Make in India’. This is the first time that customers are paying upfront platform usage fees in real estate since they can clearly see 80-90% savings in their transaction cost. The market size of residential rental and resale brokerage in India’s top-tier cities is an astounding is $6.5 billion which is estimated to grow to $17 billion over the next 5 years.
