Battle in the online real estate segment is on: Bangalore-based online real estate portal CommonFloor has raised undisclosed amount of investment from Google’s late stage growth fund Google Capital.
This is CommonFloor’s third investment round in the past year, which includes $30 million from Tiger Global in September last year and Rs 64 crore from Tiger Global and Accel India in January last year. Interestingly, this comes just a month after competitor Housing.com raised $90 million from SoftBank group.
CommonFloor co-founder & CEO Sumit Jain said that they will be using the money raised in improving its platform for both buyers & sellers. The company claims to have listed more than one lakh residential projects from across 200 cities on their platform and mapped over 10 million homes across the country. This investment will also likely be used for making acquisitions like the Bakfy one yesterday or the Flat.to one in April last year.
CommonFloor currently offers its services in four different verticals: real estate marketplace, Home Needs section, Apartment Groups section, and student and bachelor accommodation section. The Home Needs section lets users search for home decor and other home services vendors, home loan experts, and home appliance dealers among others. The Groups section lets users create local communities and provides them with a sort of management platform.
Investments in Online real estate segment
– Last month, Housing.com had raised $90 million from SoftBank group & others. The company had also raised $18 million from Helion Venture Partners, Qualcomm Ventures and existing investor Nexus Venture Partners in June last year.
– In November 2014, News Corp had picked up 25% stake in PropTiger parent for $30 million.
– In October, Info Edge had raised Rs 750 crore through qualified institutional placement to invest in its online real estate business 99Acres. (Read: How 99Acres plans to use the $120 million it has raised).
Both 99Acres and MagicBricks.com (owned by the Times of India group) claim to be leaders in the online real estate listings space (and disagree on who exactly leads, based of different interpretation of traffic data).
– Indiaproperty.com had raised $12 million from Bertelsmann and others.
– The Hindu had also launched a real estate portal called Roofandfloor.com in September this year.
