NoBroker Is Solving the Real Estate Puzzle Through Tech-Led Solutions Starting with property rental, the startup now offers a range of services such as packers-and-movers, a visitor and community management app, and home services.
By Saurabh Kumar •
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NoBroker started in 2014 as a platform to bring together property owners and prospective tenants, eliminating the middlemen who, the founders believed, did not value-add much to the ecosystem.
Six years since, while the core principle of the platform has remained the same, various tech-driven features and services have been added to make the platform an all-encompassing one.
Founded by IIT and IIM graduates Amit Kumar Agarwal, Akhil Gupta and Saurabh Garg, the Bengaluru-headquartered start-up now offers a range of services apart from real estate such as packers-and-movers services, a visitor and community management app called NoBrokerHood, and home-services such as home-cleaning, home-painting and air-conditioning repairs, among others.
"NoBroker is a full-fledged tech driven platform which does not employ feet on street to solve customer problems. It solves all problems solely using technology. It makes property inventory discoverable online, so property seekers do not have to engage with middlemen. Apart from that it deploys technology heavily to help customers come closer to their home-search goal," said 38-year-old Gupta.
NoBroker's "Travel-Time Search' feature helps home-seekers choose the locations for stay depending on their place of work and kids' school, for instance. "The algorithm measures distance in time and not kilometres to help understand the exact amount of time that one would have to spend on road," according to Gupta. Another feature called "Rent-o-meter' allows customers to predict the right rent of a property depending on area, size and locality. These are done through the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Gupta claims that the company is among very few in the country that have successfully deployed a WhatsApp bot for property listings and communication with customers.
Given the COVID-19 outbreak, NoBroker recently launched "video tour' of properties to help people shortlist properties without having to actually visit. It also allows customers to pay their rent via credit cards and other methods through NoBroker Pay.
Even during the lockdown when most startups are struggling to stay afloat, NoBroker added a further $30 million to its Series D round led by General Atlantic.
According to Gupta, the company has built data-driven machine learning and artificial intelligence solutions to convert human intelligence into algorithms and help customers explore that information without needing to interact with anyone. He believes businesses with high tech involvement can scale faster with lesser people and have greater control over the things. "Of all the business, the ones that thrive on technology have a faster trajectory towards profitability globally."
NoBroker plans to expand to new territories and has launched services in six cities in the last four-five months.
