Makaan is a real estate classifieds firm for buying, selling, and renting. It claims to have around 200,000 active property listings from 40,000 brokers in 50 Indian cities. PropTiger on the other hand provides services like property search, site visits, home loan advice, and assistance in the final registration of property.
Interestingly, PropTiger is four years younger than Makaan, which was founded in 2007.
“Together, PropTiger and Makaan will provide home buyers with a platform to guide them through the early stages of home search and identification, and all the way until they have the keys to their home,” says Dhruv Agarwala, co-founder and CEO of PropTiger, in a statement.
“The fully assisted home buying experience will include being able to shortlist the right set of homes from a wide array of listings online, and then having a personalized service that helps with site visits, price negotiations, documentation, home financing, registration, and post sales services,” he explains.
Hot property
PropTiger claims to have sold 12,000 homes worth US$1.2 billion through its platform. It has a team of over 500 people including engineers, product experts, and property advisors in eight major Indian cities.
The company also provides real estate consulting and data services to institutions such as real estate developers, private equity investors, and banks. Its proprietary database contains information and transaction data on India’s residential real estate sector in 20 major cities in India.
Makaan is owned by People Group, which also runs matchmaking site Shaadi and mobile content company Mauj Mobile. It was founded by Anupam Mittal.
“In addition to being able to combine Makaan listings and PropTiger home buying services, we can also now tap Anupam’s proven expertise in profitably engaging digital audiences in India,” says Raju Narisetti, senior vice president of strategy for News Corp, which earlier acquired a 25 percent stake in PropTiger’s parent firm.
Boom town
The online real estate search space is heating up in India with several players picking up big bucks from Indian and international private equity firms. The most sizable is Softbank-backed Housing, which has raised over US$120 million. The startup has also acquired a real estate forum called Indian Real Estate Forum (IREF) and is reportedly set to acquire many more startups to add newer services to its site.
Another firm, 99acres, raised US$125 million from Info Edge in QIP, while Google Capital-backed CommonFloor has also raised significant funding. CommonFloor is another major portal that has recently been acquiring rival startups, such as snapping up a real estate listings site targeted at students looking for rental accommodation.
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