CommonFloor raises $30 million Series E funding from Tiger Global
Realty portal CommonFloor.com has raised its Series E capital from Tiger Global. Tiger Global was already on the board of the company through previous rounds. The firm has raised Series B from Accel Partners and Tiger Global, Series D led by Tiger Global totaling to an estimated $18 million.
Sumit Jain, co-founder of CommonFloor said over a telephonic interaction that "since the last round of investment of $10 million in January 2014, the website has seen a 100% increase in traffic, 125% increase in listings and 100% increase in revenues". The web portal claims to have over 500,000 listings, with their differentiation being that 40-50% of the listings are directly from home owners as opposed to brokers / real estate agents. Sumit believes that their product 'CommonFloor Groups' which is already being used widely by apartment societies, is the key reason for homeowners choosing this portal as the preferred destination over other competitors in the market.
This additional capital is to be used to enhance the product and technology along with improving the comprehensiveness and the quality of listings, as mentioned by Sumit. The startup is also planning to scale the marketing prowess in the existing 18 cities and also add four more cities in the coming months. The workforce is slated to increase from the present 900 to 1500 by March 2015.
Specifically on technology, the CommonFloor Models have been introduced where the firm takes the building plans from various builders and creates walkthroughs for customers to have a more immersive experience in making a decision. This feature has been implemented for over 1000 projects, claimed Sumit. In addition to technology enhancements, the plan is to also come up with more user centric features such as the recently introduced "collections", which is a different way of slicing the listings. This feature drops the location, price and builder as the primary criteria and chooses instead to go with lifestyle themes such as houses for sports lovers or kid-friendly or senior citizen-friendly.
CommonFloor was founded by Sumit Jain, Vikas Malpani and Lalit Mangal in 2007. The firm recently also acquired Flat.to and is currently in a battle with other realty websites such as Housing.com and traditional ones such as 99Acres and MagicBricks.com