Milgaya aims to go beyond property listings and truly match each buyer and seller

Whether it is finding the house that suits your needs or even a buyer/lessee who takes your property, there are several gaps that many online real estate players do not seem to address. Looking at the unsolved problems in this sector, which is growing at 25–30 per cent annually, Girish B and Gopi founded Milgaya in order to truly organise the real estate sector.

Prior to starting up, the duo spent a year doing field study, visiting apartments, organised and unorganised brokers, reviewing real estate portals and studying the entire process of buying and selling property.

Workings

Milgaya, an online platform, aims to add processes to the property buying and selling system. The team works toward providing a hassle-free, transparent, and guided experience in selling, renting, buying of residential properties.

The team consists of 'Sarathis or guides, who give the customers in-depth knowledge of the areas and spaces. The customers are provided with the best match based on their needs and requirements. The database on the platform is verified by feet on the street and routine checks with the sellers and buyers.

Also read: How real estate startup, Square Yards grew to 100+ crores in revenue in 22 months

Core team backgrounds

Girish has over 20 years of corporate experience in sales and marketing in MNCs like Godrej, Voltas, Whirlpool, and Lohia Corp. He is an alumnus from Narsee Monjee and also teaches MBA students.

Gopi was roped in as a co-founder for leading the backend, which includes the IT and building of the CRM process to manage selling and buying process with all touch points being recorded and mapped. Gopi has around 22 years of corporate experience across companies like Oracle, Tech Mahindra, Cisco.

Setting up and it's road blocks

While sure of the space, the challenges the duo faced as founders weren't part of the real estate industry. "We convinced an evangelist investor to put in the seed capital of close to one crore, 60 per cent of which went into initial operation cost, prototyping, and creating the IT backbone for Milgaya," says Girish.

The team appointed idiom to help prototyping their model, branding, marketing, and standardising the customer interaction space. Milgaya started operations in December 2012, and began their services in East Bengaluru. However, it took the team a year to set base and their first deal happened in December 2013, by March 2014 they had 10 deals with a gross asset value of 6.5 crore.

Traction

Girish adds that they also found gaps in their service delivery and the CRM portal, which they reworked and were ready with a new Buyer interface by December 2014.

"As on August 2015, we have added 150 sellers in one month to take the seller count to above 600, which gave us 450 unique buyer inquiries in August alone," says Girish. Milgaya is currently averaging at five deals in a month and for the last six months the gross asset value is at above three crore.

"This helps us to break even on our operations cost for last six months, which is a reasonable achievement for a three-year-old startup," says Girish. The team provides an end-to-end, professionally managed service with an option to pay a flat fee versus a percentage of the sale. The team intends to open two satellite centres, one in Yelahanka and the other in south Bengaluru, by the first quarter of 2016.

Future plans

By 2020, Milgaya aims to be the largest real estate consultant with its presence in 10 cities and 25 offices run by professionals for professionals. "We will have our App which will be a street view of available options representing 80% of the total universe available," adds Girish.

By 2016 they also plan to branch into:

1. The primary market (with our ‘Delivery Assured from Builder else money back with interest' Guarantee).

2. Commercials (with an exclusive real-time marketplace providing approximately 80 per cent of the universe in that locality).

The market space

By 2020, the market is expected to touch $180 billion. According to IBEF, the housing sector contributes close to six per cent of the country's GDP. The space is believed to be the second most active sector and has seen a FDI in flow of close to $24.1 billion from 2000 to 2015.

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