How NoBroker created a niche in real estate space by eliminating brokerage

Over the last two decades, traditional business have begun getting disrupted by technology across sectors. One such sector is the real estate market establishing direct engagement between buyers and sellers.

Facing the challenge of finding an apartment with huge brokerage cost like millions of Indian, led these three co-founders- Akhil Gupta, Amit Kumar Agarwal and Saurabh Garg come together and find a solution in which a broker can't do anything and only genuine owners, tenants, buyers and sellers could interact. And, that paved the way for the launch of NoBroker in 2014.

“We face so many issues when we try to find a home. So we felt that there's a huge amount of latent demand and nobody's serving that demand. So that's how NoBroker started. And I think from the customer point of view, it was bang on because, with very little marketing budget, we could scale up immediately and we could see that the traction is building,” says Saurabh Garg, Cofounder and CBO at NoBroker.

At first, the challenge was to convince investors about their proposition, says Garg. After knocking on doors of nearly 100 investors in India to no avail, it is now India’s first proptech unicorn with a presence in nearly six cities. 

Going online

NoBroker is desgined to be a two sided marketplace. While transitioning online on the demand side—which comprises of mainly tenants and buyers—was simple, the same cannot be said for the supply side. This is because it comprises of several senior citizen owners who were not tech-savvy. 

“So what we did is we told them to follow the same process as they did with the brokers. They did not have to come to our website or download our app. Simply give us a call, share your details and we will list your property. And we told them that as you are sharing with the broker, share with us the details too. And see who does it faster. And of course technology wins,” explains Garg.

Some other strategies included targetting the younger property owners who would post ads on behalf of their parents. 

“Second, there were people who didn't want to pay brokerage and  they used to put up a board for rent or for sale outside their home with their phone number…  early on we used to go click those pictures and come back, and call those guys and list their properties on our platform,” he shares. 

Garg said the company later made the decision to open up the platform instead of manually hunting out these ads. “Whoever had our app could just click the pictures, upload on our app, and automatically an algorithm runs and  the contact number comes to our call centre guys. They will call the owner, list the property and if the property is listed, we used to pay Rs 100 to the Paytm account of the submitter. That became the world's largest crowdsourcing.That was a great way to move those offline owners to online owners and that short circuited the entire journey.” 

Properties on NoBroker are rented out between 3-4 hours, which would otherwise take nearly 30 days, as per Garg. 

India pays nearly $20 billion a year as brokerage cost annually, says Garg.

“So we didn't have to do much because people were paying such a huge amount of money. They were paying money out of their pocket, and suddenly we're saying, you can do it at a fraction of cost or you can do it at free of cost. So clearly, I think it is a huge value which we're able to add,” says Garg.