Update: Housing.co.in has now expanded its operations to Bangalore, reports TechCrunch. With this, the company is now operational in five cities – Bangalore, Mumbai, Gurgaon, Hyderabad and Pune.
Earlier (June 4): Map-based real estate portal Housing.co.in has raised $2.5 million investment from Nexus Venture Partners. The company plans to use the investment raised to open a Data Science Lab (DSL), build new technologies to the portal and strengthen its technology and data sciences teams.
Prior to this, Housing.co.in had raised undisclosed amount of funding from former Network 18 Group CEO Haresh Chawla in March 2013 and an undisclosed amount of angel investment led by Chaupaati Bazaar co-founder Zishaan Hayath and participation from other investors like Vaibhav Puranik, Shishir Kapoor, Hemanth Goteti, Gagan Goyal, Harsh Baid, Aditya Agarwal and Aatif Misbah in February 2013.
Founded in July 2012, Housing.co.in is a map-based property listing portal, which allows users to search for rental and property purchase listings and also overlays these listings on a map. The company claims to include only curated property listings on its portal and offers its service as a web app and a mobile site. One can sort these listings based on price or filter these listings based on property type, pricing, furnishing, number of rooms, bathrooms, beds and availability of features like Lift, Gym, Security and Parking among others.
Following this, one can browse through any of these listings in the side bar or manually zoom into the map to view listings for a specific location. One can also click on any specific listing to view pictures of that property, browse through additional information about it and contact the landlord or the builder to make the booking. The site is currently operational in Mumbai, Gurgaon, Hyderabad and Pune, having launched its operations in Hyderabad, Gurgaon and Pune last week.
Data Science Lab: While Housing.co.in didn’t disclose much information about the upcoming Data Science Lab, the company said that Data Science Lab will be developing features like area based pricing and society ratings among others.
Competitors: Accel Partners-backed real estate and apartment management portal, Commonfloor also offers a similar location based property search service called Commonfloor Maps, to overlay rental and property listings on a map, however we felt Housing.co.in’s interface to be much simpler than Commonfloor Maps at the time of writing this article.
Besides this, Housing.co.in competes with Times Business Solutions’ property listing portal MagicBricks, Info Edge’s 99Acres and IndiaProperty which recently demerged as a separate entity from its parent company Consim Info. Generic classified portals like Quikr, Olx and Click.in among others also have real estate listings.
