In a recent conference call InfoEdge CEO Hitesh Oberoi mentioned that the focus of 99Acres.com, it's real estate portal, is on adding more and more dealers as customers. At present, the site has around 6000 customers, and for this business to become big, Oberoi believes they need tens of thousands of dealers. "The problem we have out there, however, is that a lot of the dealers are not very tech savvy. Many of them do not have computers, they don’t have access to the Internet so fair amount of time is spent on educating them on how to use the Internet, on helping them buy an internet connection. And therefore while this business will scale in the long run, it will scale slowly," Oberoi said. Source: InfoEdge Data Sheet Most of 99Acres' business comes from Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore, followed by Chennai, Hyderabad and Pune. A few interesting points worth noting: - Quarter ending March 2008: The total number of listings increased to 209,000 from 91,000, but the number of paid listings increased to only to 44,000 from 24,000. This is when 99Acres perhaps increased offers of free listings. - Quarter ending September 2008: the number of paid listings, over two quarters, grew from 44,000 to 237,000even as the total number of listings grew slowly from 209,000 to 237,000. - Quarter ending March 2009: at its peak, 99Acres had 287,000 listings, of which 255,000 were paid. Then a decline followed, as free listings were rolled back. - Quarter ending June 2010: The number…
