Property hunt website Grabhouse has received a makeover and added several features after raising an undisclosed amount of funding from India Quotient and MV Krishnan of Deutsche Bank. The company received this round of angel funding in November according to NextBigWhat. It had also raised from RB Partners’ Chetan Bohra and Navin Ranka early last year when it launched. According to the company, in the five months since its launch it already has more than 1,100 roomseeker profiles created, 500+ listings of the houses without brokers, 150+ users who found houses or roommates through the service.
Grabhouse, co-founded by Prateek Shukla and Pankhuri Shrivastava, plans to use the funds raised to improve its infrastructure and for developing new features. It has announced a flurry of updates to its site that will help people find roommates faster.
The site now lets you create a flyer with all the details of your listing that can then be shared on other social media sites. The site also lets you specify your preferences, likes and dislikes in the listings to make it easier to find people that are compatible with you.
Competition: Other players in the space include Accel Partners & Tiger Global-backed CommonFloor, Nexus Venture Partners-backed Housing, Accel Partners & SAIF Partners backed PropTiger, Times Business Solutions’ property listing portal MagicBricks, Info Edge’s 99Acres, TTK Group’s Home Shikari and real estate group buying portal Groffr, IndiaProperty backed by Canaan Partners and Mayfield Fund.
What differentiates Grabhouse from the other players is the fact that it lets you look for a housemate and not just for fresh apartment listing. It is an interesting category, but it might also face issue from a legal perspective as most landlords put in a clause dissuading sub-letting. It needs to be noted that listings site Sulekha has a very similar feature and it has been around for a long time.
