Post funding, Housing.co.in launches operations in Gurgaon, Hyderabad and Pune

After raising two quick rounds of funding, one lead by ex Futurebazaar VP, Zeeshan Hayath and the other lead by ex Network 18 CEO, Haresh Chawla, Mumbai based property listing site, Housing.co.in has expanded its operation to three other cities - Gurgaon, Hyderabad and Pune. At the time of raising their second round, Advitiya Sharma, co-founder of Housing.co.in, has told us that Hyderabad would definitely be one of the cities that they'd be looking to expand to, based on poll conducted on their Facebook fan page. We caught up with the Housing.co.in team to know more -

Why these three cities? 

Advitiya Sharma shared that the reason behind launching in these three cities were mainly driven by the results of the social media poll that they had conducted a few months back - "Apart from this , we had a lot of calls and emails inquiring about our services and requesting us to come to their cities as well. Most of these requests came from Pune and Gurgaon. Besides, these two cites were in the top five cities in the poll as well."

Advitiya further adds, "The response in the other three cities has been phenomenal. We've already set up our sales and data aggregation teams in all the cities and have been doing data collection for about a week or so. The listings in all three cities are over a 100 properties now."

To accomodate the new cities, the website's UI has been tweaked a bit. Furthermore, the current form of the website also prompts a search option before presenting the map view of the region with properties marked on it. Apart from the new launches, Advitiya shared that it's business as

usual for Housing.co.in in Mumbai - "Rent requests really peak in Mumbai during June, July and August. Over the past months, we have been growing steadily, partnering with more brokers and steadily increasing our listings as well."

Challenges, Targets and expectations in the new cities

Ravish Naresh, one of Housing.co.in's co-founder, who's currently leading expansion at Housing.co.in said that setting up operations in these cities was fairly frictionless. He said, "The only thing that we were wary about was the apprehension the brokers in Gurgaon would have in putting up photos of the properties on the site. But luckily no such thing has happened so far and we're clocking high number of properties a day in these three cities."

Ravish shared that the teams in these three cities would be looking to penetrate as many areas as possible and attached a timeline of a month to it. He says, "The aim is to penetrate all areas. We started operations just a few days back and the response has been good. Because all the listing on our site are fresh, the size of the inventory that we maintain is dependent on how quickly the houses get occupants also. That is something we will know in the coming months as well.

He further added that Housing.co.in tapped into all avenues with respect to hiring in the new cities - "Finding those great guys has and will always be difficult. However, we've set up an able data aggregation and sales team in all the cities, and things are going as planned."

Because the founding team of Housing.co.in is a fairly young team, we asked Ravish how they've gone about hiring people senior to them. He said, "I think convincing people to join us has never been a problem. Joining a high energy startup like ours will any day be more exciting for a person as opposed to getting them to join a corporate setting. For example, Tapas, whom you recently covered, is senior to all of us in terms of age. And fitting in for someone new with a team like us has never been problem so far."

Check out Housing.co.in's new site and use the comment section to congratulate them.