It is quite often when one has to look for a suitable location for their personal or professional needs which satisfies all their requirements. Isn’t it a tiring endeavor to get the task done conventionally? Where one has to reach all such probable places and comparing them to select the best fit. Yes, it is indeed a very time consuming and resource intensive as well. To make this task seamlessly easier and convenient, a group of 3 IITians came up with an amazing solution, CommonFloor.com wherein they created an e-commerce platform to showcase all the available real estate sites for rent or selling purpose in India like apartments, plots, villas, and others.
Contents
Foundation
Commonfloor.com got its inception in 2007 by three IITians from Computer science background. The founders are Lalit Mangal, Vikas Malpani and headed by Sumit Jain. The headquarters is situated in Bangalore, India. The company behind this portal is maxHeap Technologies.
Funding
The company has received funding from 3 investors in 4 rounds.
- Tiger Global Management along with Accel Partners invested around $7.5 Million in June 2013.
- Tiger Global Management along with Accel Partners invested around $10.4 Million in Jan 2014.
- Tiger Global Management made another investment of $30 Million in Sep, 2014.
- Google Capital too invested an amount of $15 Million in Jan 2015.
- It was finally acquired by Quikr in Jan 2016 and the deal was a hefty amount of $200 Million.
Products
Currently, CommonFloor.com has listings in excess of 100k projects and 500k properties. It has various products for the users by which they can buy, sell and rent properties.
- com group’s Apartment Management System(AMS)is the flagship product which helps in connecting the residents of a locality through a common platform. This is also used for administrative purposes in the society for the collection of various dues, facilitating discussions, passing notices, keeping invoices records, events, and others.
- The official website commonfloor.com provides live in tours supported by Virtual Reality (VR) by which the users get a real feel of the place and it’s surrounding with great precision even without being present there physically. It provides complete details about the property’s specifications.
- It provides updated reports to the users by conducting various surveys across all the registered properties and then analyzing the reports for the benefit of users.
- By the introduction of mobile applications which supports almost all the platforms, it has made it really convenient for the users to hack into the details they need by just making few clicks, be it getting live I tour or accessing the AMS.
Business Model
It follows a community-based approach which is quite different from the rest of its competitors. It provides a complete solution for booking a property, be it for selecting the optimum one or booking it and even when one has shifted into the locality and wants to sell it back. Revenue is generated from various sources like:
- Charging the property owners for publishing their properties on the portal.
- Subscription based model for AMS, by which they generate revenue from the builders.
- Local vendors to get linked up with them for marketing of their products.
Competition
Commonfloor.com has various competitors like MagicBricks.com, 99acres.com, Housing.com, and others which are expanding at a decent rate.
It is a very unique and innovative start-up making life simpler for many people looking for their dream house, apartments, villas and many others. It hasn’t just enabled the use of this system to find his ideal house undertaking least of troubles but also has made the experience quite cherishing and the user gets ample of choices and saves his precious time and money. Even after the selection is done, the Commonfloor.com stays with them to help them get the best-staying experience in the locality through the AMS.