NoBroker’s end to end services for your property search
I recently changed my job. If you are working in Bangalore, changing job often means changing your home location. I came to Bangalore 3 years ago when I moved from Gurgaon to Bangalore. My last employer was generous. They offered a relocation plan. A broker from Writer Relocation helped me find a house, gas connection, cable connection and shift stuff. This was immensely helpful. I eased into living a Bangalorean life.
This time I was changing job within city. Relocation benefits were out of question. I was on my own. Still I had to move to new place to avoid traffic. My only requirements for new house were — a place closer to office within a reasonable budget. I set out to look for house on popular portals such as 99acres.com and magicbricks.com. I soon realised that searching for properties was lot of efforts. Inspite of living in Bangalore for 3 years, I had no sense of what all localities could be considered closer to my new office. Neither did portals help me find suitable localities. Also, majority of listings on both 99acres and Magicbricks belong to brokers. Brokers either don’t respond to your queries or you feel helpless talking to them because of language gap. Lastly, in this new world of assisted models, where everything happens with a click of button, using these portals feel as if you are on your own and there is no one to handhold you as you go through the journey of finding a perfect place for yourself especially when you don’t have enough free time at your disposal. After couple of tries, I eventually gave up.
Enter NoBroker.com. I have to admit that the name ‘NoBroker’ didn’t inspire much confidence. I just wanted to find a home — with or without the help of a broker. As soon as I registered on NoBroker, I got a callback. The caller told me about various plans that NoBroker has for someone seeking a rental home. I had my doubts but this is exactly what I was looking for! I bought Relax Plan.
Soon I was assigned a RM or Relationship Manager. She understood my requirements and shared a bunch of properties for me to select from. I could accept or reject the property in a ‘tinderish’ sort of way! As I was accepting and rejecting properties, RM would get on a call and try to understand my ‘unspoken’ requirements at a more granular level. For example, I wouldn’t select a house which looked old or didn’t have modern aesthetics. After I had accepted a few properties, RM talked to owners and set up appointments. This was a huge help. Not only language can be a barrier at times, owners also don’t feel comfortable talking to any random stranger and prefer a referral lead.
I visited a couple of shortlisted properties. Rejected all of them. RM was again on call to understand my reasons for rejections. It turned out that I had much broader requirement beyond my stated requirement of a house near my new office. First of all, I actually wanted to live in an apartment and not in a villa or a standalone house. I wanted power backup and lift services. I didn’t want to live in a ground floor apartment either. With these additional requirements, RM curated next set of properties for me. I started liking new recommendations and after two visits, finalised my dream home. All this was at a fraction of the cost of what a broker would have charged me! NoBroker did earn its subscription fee but compared to classified portals, it learnt far more from this transaction. They know for sure that the deal indeed happened through its platform for the exact unit that was posted on its platform. It knows actual rental value of the property. It now knows my preference. Next time when I am again in the market to find a rental house, it can actually personalise recommendations based on the property I finalised last time. Bonus points, it can immediately take off the listing from the platform to keep the platform accurate and updated.
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NoBroker services didn’t stop here. Now that I had finalised house, I was already dreading dealing with movers & packers for helping me move stuff. NoBroker had better plans for me. The RM called me up and assigned me an another RM for moving requests. This new RM understood all my requirements. He made a list of the stuff I had. Explained charges. Insisted that I buy an extra Rs. 400 package if apartment didn’t have a service lift and also sold me a move-in insurance. Nobroker kept 15% of the total move-in charges!
Nobroker also helps you with furniture rental and house paintings. It also offers relocation services to company employees. Not every company can afford expensive relocation packages. Given the end to end services that NoBroker offers, it is in a best position to offer these services at no incremental cost to its business. NoBroker can also generate rental agreement and rental receipts for you at the click of a button. You can also pay your rent on credit card and earn cashbacks. These ancillary services are not only useful for users, these also provide a hook for the users to remain engaged with the platform even after their needs are fulfilled. I am sure as a result of these services, Nobroker is also accumulating most authentic data on actual rental prices.
I didn’t experience the owner side of the platform, but I can guess that they are similarly handholding owners. When owners post property detail on their own, they leave out many details. But a trained executive at NoBroker will make sure that all information about the property is correctly captured in their database and is made available to anyone searching for properties online. By keeping brokers away from platform, NoBroker is also providing better experience to owners. Many owners don’t post properties on classified sites as they are wary of the outpour of unwanted calls when they post property on classified sites. However, by restricting tenants/buyers and forcing them to buy paid subscriptions, Nobroker is making sure that the site is used by genuine users with genuine requirements.
Apart from tenants and owners, NoBroker is providing a great value to the business owners of ancillary services. If you think about it, Nobroker is in fact acting as a pre-sales customer support department for owners, movers & packers, painters, and others. NoBroker is the first interface to customers. Their trained customer executives understand requirements, explain offerings and match customers to the correct product and services. If I, as a small business owner, want to start a movers & packers services or a home painting services, I only need to find employees who will do the actual execution while I can outsource customer support to NoBrokers.com!
So what are next set of challenges for Nobroker? It of course has to double down on its moat — keeping the platform genuine (e.g. preventing platform from brokers posing as owner or tenant/buyer), acquiring owner properties and providing a high NPS service as it extends into multiple ancillary businesses. However, its biggest challenge will be to replicate similar experience in property sale/buy experience. A tenant is in market for a limited time. He or she is looking to quickly close the deal. A property buyer, however, is typically in market for more than 6 months. He or she is likely to talk to multiple folks before finalising a life time investment. Having access to a good property broker can be immensely helpful in property buying journey. A broker does offer a lot of value by bringing together two parties, helping with negotiations and price discovery, and in finally getting the deeds registered. It may be difficult to digitise this whole experience. NoBroker is trying to have a play in the space by providing buyer assistance and builder assistance services. Buyer’s get legal services such as title check, certificate checks, deed execution etc. To builders, NoBroker is promising qualified leads.
In 2018, NoBroker’s revenue from operations stood at Rs 8.6 crore. 70% of its revenue come from subscriptions that users are buying. In comparison, 99acres made Rs. 157 Cr in revenue in 2018. There is a long way to go for NoBroker. To grow its revenue it would need to have a play in new/resale property space and expand to newer cities (as it did by moving to Delhi NCR recently). As NoBroker has become a customer interface to various businesses such as movers & packers, home painters, real estate legal experts etc., it may have to think of ways to partner with brokers and builders as it goes about scaling its new/resale businesses. One other model to look for inspiration could be OpenDoor’s model. OpenDoor directly buys property from owners and let buyers instantly unlock and visit homes they want to. This is of course a high risk capital intensive model. However, OpenDoor has brought about multiple innovations in making home buying an easy experience for both buyer and sellers. At any point they have 11,000+ professionals on their platform including plumbers, electricians, mortgage experts who help them with multiple stages of home buying process.
While Nobroker is an exciting prospect, one cannot discount the ability of market leaders — 99acres and magicbricks to adopt to the changing needs of customers. When Housing.com and Commonfloor.com entered market, both leaders were forced to innovate by offering verified listings and a better UX. Will the leaders adopt or NoBroker race head, we don’t know yet. However as users now become comfortable interacting with online services and are far more willing to take out credit card for that convenience, NoBroker has created a new business model for itself and definitely elevated customer experience by a few notches up!
