“Endeavour To Create The Change You Want To See”

Realty Plus in conversation with Akhil Gupta. He is the Co-founder & CTO of NoBroker.com, the world’s largest ‘customer-to-customer’ real estate portal. In addition to spearheading the entire tech vertical, he is responsible for building, scaling, and managing teams, as well as driving overall business growth at NoBroker.com.  What is the idea behind the inception of NoBroker.com? The process of renting a house in India house is completely broken. When one is looking to rent a house they will either look for a broker who resides in that vicinity or they will go to one of the classified sites and there theywill find a contact that will eventually lead them to a broker. These brokers first take the customers to the worst houses and gradually move on to the better ones, from which he will get the most possible commission. The commission is most of the time one month’srent from the owner as well as the tenant. One kind of contract is where the broker includes an 18% brokerage fee. The entire process is extremely tiresome and 60% of the time the customer doesn’t even end up with the house of their choice. This is where the idea of Nobroker.com came to the forefront. We want to ease the way of renting and make the entire more transparent. With the use of technology we have come up with a way to eliminate the broker. So, on the NoBroker.com site we have only genuine property owners, buyers and tenants. When we started in 2013 we studied all the other websites such as MakeMyTrip, BookMyShow and so on. What all these portals had in common was the fact that they had eliminated the physical agent and taken the entire process online. NoBroker.com is a very democratic platform where there is no bias towards any of the involved parties. Our main aim is to build a platform that is consumer focused and which genuinely solves the consumer’s problems at a fraction of the cost. On our platform the interested consumer is put directly in contact with the property owner.  Generation of revenue. We do not charge inflated rates like physical brokers. What broker earn is not at all justified. We the help of technology we have removed the need for having physical agents on the ground level. This has brought down the cost. Everything that is need by the customer is done directly by using our app, telephone, sms and Watsapp. So by making use of all of these the cost has been further brought down. We try to save as much as possible of our consumer’s money. We close about 11500 deals on our platform per month, much more than a broker. We are market leaders in all the five cities where we are operating. So, when one does business on such a volume they can always cut down the price. Take for example, Reliance Jio, they have shaken the incumbent market who have been doing business for years. By providing the same product at one tenth the cost. This is how we aim to do business as well. Technology has powered the disruption and disruption powered the cost. In this manner we identify ourselves as a proptech company.  What is the screening process that Nobroker.com undertakes for those registered on the site? We have a team that goes through the participators and screens out the users according to their details. We certainly do not work with any brokers. We have a C2C business so only buyers, tenants and owners are allowed registration on the platform.  Do you’ll take into consideration the feedback on your site? Does negative feedback cause effect? Every site will have some issue or the other. We are a consumer focused company. Our product development, new features and anything else we are coming up with is completely based on the feedback what we get from customers. All the feedback be it positive or negative lands in the mail box of the company, and we actively look for ways to increase customer satisfaction. If you see our ratings on Facebook, they are 4.3 and 4.2 on Google. This is extremely good for any consumer focused company. We take negative feedback in our stride and whole heartedly work on improving our services.  How do you’ll tackle the issue of authenticity? We have technology that helps to identify the pictures and the respective property.  Customer response? The response from our consumers has been amazingand like I said we close 11500 deals per month which in turns results in brokerage savings of upto to 85 crore. So far I can strongly say that we have got a phenomenal response from our customers. If you go to play store you will see our ratings as 4.2  Challenges When we first started making our impact in 2015, we had around 40- 50 brokers that came and attacked our office. It got so severe that we had to vacate the office. That was a real challenge for us.  Outlook for the New Year In 2018 we have entered into the commercial space. Nobroker.comCompany is now also active in the commercial leasing space. So our goal is to further build our reach and serve our customers to the best of our abilities. We are also looking at entering more cities as well as delving deeper into the cities we are already have presence. We want to do 50,000 transactions per month by end of 2019.