Okay. Commonfloor has been acquired by Quikr (we told you this last year itself). The two companies took to Twitter to do PDA (public display of affection acquisition)
The deal, from what we know values Commonfloor at $200mn and the company will continue to operate as a stand-alone entity.
Started 7 years back, Commonfloor last raised $12mn from Google Ventures (in total, $63mn) and has launched multiple products – right from VR to visualized market data using GIS.
Commonfloor Founders
Commonfloor recorded a revenue of Rs. 44 crores in FY14-15 (against a loss of Rs 86.2 Crores).
Why Quikr And Commonfloor Need To Live Together?
The merger, which is expected to be completed over the next two to three months, will give CommonFloor.com access to Quikr’s 30 million consumers and harness the potential of the cross category nature of the platform, while QuikrHomes will benefit from CommonFloor’s structured data and domain expertise. The combined force of two entities will create a strong online real estate industry leader, which has the largest inventory and property seeker traffic in the country.
The company will continue to operate both brands in the market and honor the commitment towards their respective customers. Further, given that the two companies have the same technology stack, the CommonFloor.com team will have expanded scope across Quikr’s four other verticals in order to further accelerate its growth
Simply put, Commonfloor gets access to Quikr userbase – which helps it grows faster than the competition.
And for Quikr, they get a ready made home for QuikrHomes property. Quikr last raised $150mn and need to focus on revenue earning properties – so why not start with real estate.
Ofcourse, the common investors include Tiger Global.
“The combined 2 million property listing makes us leaders.” says Pranay, Quikr founder and CEO.
Quikr recently acquired Indian Realty Exchange (IRX), a mobile-first aggregator of real estate broker community and realtycompass, a platform that provides builder rating and project analysis. It also made a strategic investment in A N Virtual Tech, the only company in India that has detailed real life imagery of 90%+ streets and buildings across India’s top 50 cities
The Commonfloor Journey
Watch cofounder, Vikas talk about Commonfloor journey at UnPluggd 2014.
And while a lot of NextBigWhat readers are wondering whether the news is correct or not, Quikr and Commonfloor are making the final announcement today at Quikr’s Bangalore office.
The deal, from what we know values Commonfloor at $200mn (100% equity) and the company will continue to operate as a stand-alone entity.
Plus, one of the Commonfloor founders will get a board set at Quikr.
Commonfloor has in total raised $62mn and generated a revenue of Rs. 44 crores ($7mn) in FY14-15 and will now be part of Quikr’s new focus area, i.e. Quikr Homes.
Commonfloor has in total raised $62mn and generated a revenue of Rs. 44 crores ($7mn) in FY14-15 and will now be part of Quikr’s new focus area, i.e. Quikr Homes.
The deal is 100% equity driven and Commonfloor team gets Quikr board set as well. Importantly, there will be no layoffs.*
Why Quikr And Commonfloor Need To Live Together?
Simply put, Commonfloor gets access to Quikr userbase – which helps it grows faster than the competition.
And for Quikr, they get a ready made home for QuikrHomes property. Quikr last raised $150mn and need to focus on revenue earning properties – so why not start with real estate.
Ofcourse, the common investors include Tiger Global.
The Commonfloor Journey
Watch cofounder, Vikas talk about Commonfloor journey at UnPluggd 2014.
Competition Housing.com is currently going through an internal restructuring and has laid-off in big numbers
*More details as we get them.
Vccircle was first to report this development, but their numbers are apparently wrong.
There were rumors of Quikr acquiring Commonfloor earlier last month. We have learned from several sources that the deal has been called off.
One of the reasons cited for the deal to be called off is the equity-cash ratio breakup offered by Quikr.
Yesterday, Commonfloor leadership team held a townhall meeting to assure employees that things are fine and that they have enough cash at hand for 15 months runway.
Commonfloor’s Strength : Data Collection & Research
One of Commonfloor’s strength lies is in data collection/research and we have learnt that 2 of top Commonfloor’s data team leaders have joined QuikrHomes few weeks back.
This might have given Quikr a definite edge in data collection and could be one of the reasons for Quikr to not negotiate further.
Commonfloor has in total raised $62mn and Quikr recently raised $150mn to expand in other categories like real estate and jobs.
CommonFloor has come up with a Geographic Information System (GIS) based real estate report which highlights key trends witnessed in real estate market across cities.
GIS offers spatial analysis or spatial statistics—it includes formal techniques which study entities using their topological, geometric, or geographic properties. GIS can be applied in real estate to generate visualized market data.
The application’s focus is not only on analyzing data through this technology but also in forecasting trends in real estate industry by producing data through GIS, says CommonFloor.
“Commonfloor’s introduction of GIS technology in real estate sector signifies their vision of organizing real estate industry through technology and data to enable fulfilling property decisions,” they added.
CommonFloor Groups, a subsidiary of commonfloor.com, has launched “Smart Guard’— a mobile app that enables gated communities to record visitor information digitally. The app is available only for Android users only.
Smart Guard aims to increase security in communities by allowing security guards to record the movement of visitors (Staff/Guests, Vendors) through the mobile app. It sends automatic SMS alerts to residents on guest arrival to ensure authorized entry.
The apartment association gets regular automated reports listing the number of visitors which helps in keeping a systematic record and good security measures at the community.
Vikas Malpani, Co-Founder & Head of CommonFloor Groups said that they are also working with a few partners to integrate Aadhaar based verification accounting.
“Our focus has always been on making communities smarter – one where residents can enjoy a hassle free and secure living and we strive to provide them the technological automation resolving their daily management hassles,” added Malpani.
CommonFloor has launched the first-ever ‘Locality Virtual Tour’ in India, enabling property buyers to have a virtual walkthrough of neighborhood of any locality, thereby saving up to 90% of the time by making the buyer not visit wrong neighbourhoods.
Property buyer can get 360 degree view or a street view of the location mapped on google maps (along with geo-code) this eliminates the need to visit the location in person which provides buyers a comprehensive perspective of the locality.
Currently, we have mapped 100 localities in Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai on this feature and we intend to list out 500 localities across 10 cities in the next six months. Our vision is to map every bit of locality on Google maps and empower user to make property decisions in half a day [Commonfloor Cofounder, Lalit Mangal / example]
Founded six months back by Gaurav Munjal and Hemesh Singh, Flatchat enables easy and quick chatting connectivity between a seeker, a prospective owner, a tenant to potential flat mates and other seekers.
The fund will also be used to scale up operations and establishing foothold across the country especially in the cities which have a higher population of students and bachelors.
Flatchat has crossed 50,000+ users across both Android and iOS platforms, with 80% of the traffic coming from Android.
More than 350,000 messages were exchanged on the platform last month and the product has seen a growth of 100% MOM.
IndiaProperty, as we speak is also looking to raise close to $50mn in Series C. Either way, the deal will happen – i.e. Series C or C, i.e. Commonfloor.
Update from IndiaProperty:
“These are just baseless rumors and have no truth in them. Indiaproperty.com has no plans to sell out, in fact we will be soon closing Series C funding in a couple of weeks. We are capital efficient and are in the process of rapidly expanding our operations in India and abroad.”
The online real estate platform, CommonFloor, has launched ‘Live-in Tours’ with 360-degree virtual tour for the rental and resale realty market in India.
The feature allows the user to get a complete perspective of the rental, resale & new properties listed on the website.
The company is planning to introduce this feature across 18 major cities by March 2016 and as well as to have five lakh properties listed with Live-in Tours.
“Given the boom in the rental and resale property market in India, this new offering is our endeavour to create tools and technology that makes property search easy and hassle-free for the end-consumers,” says Sumit Jain, Co-founder & CEO, CommonFloor.
Live-in Tour functions as a filter and helps the users shortlist prospective properties of their choice and eliminate the need of physically visiting the properties to a great extent. The offering is live on CommonFloor and is absolutely free for the end-users. It currently has over 1000 properties from three key cities: Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai.
Unprecedented innovation in last 6 months; we are beating the global biggies on innovation!
Indian online real estate space has seen unprecedented innovation in the last 6 months. Its great to see that we are doing stuff which even US or Chinese online real estate players are not doing.
I have listed some of my observations below: 1. The biggest move by Indian players is clearly to enable buyers to book an home online. Its like ‘e-commerce for homes’. Housing launched Slice View
IndiaProperty launched TruView
99acres launched iHome
The large global players?
Zillow and Trulia in US and Soufun (Fang), E-house and Anjuke in China are not doing any of this yet and all of them have billion dollar market caps! 2. Commonfloor launched world’s first virtual reality product for real estate- Commonfloor Retina. 3. 3D walkthroughs of new projects introduced by Indiaproperty, Commonfloor 4.Proptiger started selling discount coupons for new projects during Diwali. These discount coupons enable the buyers to get a larger discount on the sale price of the new project (eg- buy a Rs 20,000 discount coupon and get Rs 2 lacs off on a project). However, I do not see any discount coupons live as of now.
This is something that is already happening in China. E-house sold ~100,000 discount coupons in Q4 2014 alone, worth US$120 mn (implying avg discount coupon~US$1,200= INR 72,000/-). This can be a big potential opportunity in India as well. 5. Every player has redesigned their UX in the last 6–12 months. 6. Also, in general lot of startups are doing new things in this space. Some of the examples are NestAway– online marketplace for shared accommodations Zenify– Property management for owners Nobroker & Grabhouse– Find a house/flatmate without a broker
Unfortunately, the online real estate market size still remains small. Listing fee/advertising model is still a ~300 cr market. If the market does not grow fast, it will be very difficult for all the players to survive.
We are clearly lagging behind on data analytics when compared to the global players. For example- Zillow does a good job with Z-estimates. This is something that I believe will gain more focus over the next 12 months. It will be interesting to see data analytics being leveraged to provide insights/assistance to customers. [Guest article by Sandeep Reddy. Follow him on twitter @hsrdce.]
Housing Trolled By Commonfloor
What a marching month for Housing!
The company which is spending massive $$$$$$s on print ads is recently under a huge PR mess, thanks to founder’s email to Sequoia. And Housing is now being trolled by rival, Commonfloor which subtly used the controversial Lookup logo (again, an inspired one) to take a jab* at the company.
Ofcourse, a great ad slot buy by Commonfloor.
For Housing, it’s Go Die, Motherf***** as usual.
Okay okay – so it’s the game of photoshopping now! Take a look at what we got in our inbox Housing vs Commonfloor : Meta TrollsTHE FINAL ONE (Hopefully)! Okay Okay. Stop It!
*Update: It is photoshopped. What’er it is, the Indian startup ecosystem has turned fully filmy. Grab some popcorn! (is there an ‘uber for popcorn’?). [Image credit]
Real estate portal Commonfloor has raised $30mn funding led by Tiger Global Partners.
The fund will primarily be used to go deep in Tier-2 cities. Common floor currently has half a million listings, out of which 20000 comes from owners. The immediate goal, as Sumit mentions is to reach to a million active listings.
With more than 2,00,000 users visiting the portal every day, CommonFloor.com has witnessed a 100% increase in traffic, 125% jump in live listings and added over 25,000 communities in the last two quarters. The website also gets more than 25% traffic on its site via mobile app.
“We have more than doubled our revenues and traffic and the funding will further accelerate our growth plans. This round of funding will be used to invest further in our product and technology that will enhance customer experience. The company will continue to strategically scale-up its marketing and operations across the 18 cities where it’s currently present and expand to 22 new markets in India.” [Sumit Jain, Commonfloor]
CommonFloor is a real estate search and listing portal passionate about simplifying property decisions for its users. The Bangalore based company was founded by Sumit Jain, Lalit Mangal and Vikas Malpani in 2007 (read the Commonfloor Journey of scaling up).
CommonFloor offers home seekers, sellers and real estate professionals an extensive online real estate ecosystem. This ecosystem innovatively combines exhaustive search options for renting and buying property, easy to use analytics, apartment and locality reviews, comprehensive and verified database of apartments across India and apartment community management tools under the same roof.
Presently the firm has over one lakh projects, more than four lakh listings and above one crore homes listed with them.
CommonFloor received Seed fund in 2009, Series B in 2012, Series C in 2013 & Series D in 2014. Today around 800+ employees help CommonFloor to run the largest Apartment management software in nearly 120 cities in India.
Commonfloor team at an outing.
As part of NextBigWhat’s #bigaugust campaign, we speak to Sumit Jain, cofounder of Commonfloor.
How do you define ‘Company Culture’? Sumit Jain: As an organization we are High Performance driven, we therefore ensure an environment that is conducive to career growth and this kind of high performance. We follow an open door policy where senior management is easily approachable and complete transparency in company day to day workings is maintained. We also ensured that hard work does not go unrecognized by successfully incorporating appreciation, rewards and recognitions into our company culture.
When did your company start & how did you grow big? Could you share milestones (In terms of year and no. of people)? Sumit Jain: CommonFloor.com was started in 2007. We have today grown to become the largest players in the Apartment Management software segment and are currently present in 120 cities across the country. Around 100,000 communities are using CommonFloor Groups (our apartment Management offering).
In the real estate space, we have over 4 lakh listings. We have 1 Lakh projects listed with us. These projects constitute over 10 Lakh homes.
With respect to traffic are the fastest growing real estate portal in the country growing. In Bangalore, we are the number one property portal as per Alexa traffic rank. We aim to achieve a turnover of $25 million in the next two years.
With regards to headcount, we have an employee strength of over 800. We expect this number to grow significantly in the coming months. We have a presence in 18 cities pan India and intend to take this number to forty soon.
Evolution timeline of commonfloor.com
Does the company have a stated set of cultural values & what is the grounded purpose behind it?
Sumit Jain: Yes –We have 5 Values Which reflect the core philosophy of the organization Innovation, Care, Integrity, Leadership and Customer Centricity)
Customer centricity: We are passionate about delighting the customer. We endeavour to be a hero to our customers by going out of our way to solve their problems and wow them. Our objective is to make CommonFloor.com their go-to site.
Innovation: We acknowledge but embrace constraints pertaining to budget, bandwidth and tools. We allow our customer obsessiveness to fuel innovation that lets us overcome any challenge.
Care: We firmly believe quality comes with care. Care for the smallest of aspects of our day to day functions to ensure the quality of team members, meetings, conversations, impressions, product features and customer experience is a top priority. We strive to ward off apathy in our attitude to ensure that we never dilute the passion we have for this great company.
Leadership: We aspire to be an inspiration to others, and believe in giving our 100% always. We work towards ensuring that any pressure of indecision does not drag us into mediocrity and complacency.
Integrity: We champion and live by the belief that honesty and integrity are the pillars of every great organization.
Can you describe the environment in the company? Sumit Jain: As a young and dynamic organization we have been successful in fostering an environment that is informal and open. We have ensured that employees are extremely comfortable in voicing views, appreciation, concern and grievances.
Commonfloor team celebrating Holi
How often does the staff meet? Sumit Jain: We conduct town hall meetings once a month. These meeting are attended by all employees present at the office location.
What does it take for someone to be successful here? Sumit Jain: It requires the employee to be aligned to company values and goals. We analyze to what extent is an employee’s work, achievement and future ambitions in line with overall company growth. We also gauge how much an employee adheres to company core values while going about assignments.
What are your expectations from your employees? Sumit Jain: We expect them to keep overall company growth and goals in mind while planning day to day work and career growth. We also encourage them to adhere to company values while doing so.
How do you reward your employees? Sumit Jain: We deploy a fairly large range of monetary and non-monetary tools ranging from variable pay/incentives to spot awards and pat on the back.
What do you look for in a potential employee? How do you evaluate the soft-skills? Sumit Jain: We look for the following
Competence: How good he/she is at his current assignment?
Skills: What knowledge and skills he/she possesses?
Attitude: How easy is it for him/her to adjust with the team? How open is he/she to learning? How enthusiastic is he/she about his job?
We also focus on the extent of his/her alignment with company culture through a personal interview test.
How do you onboard new employee? Sumit Jain: Every new employee goes through a structured joining and induction process where he/she is apprised of significant aspects of CommonFloor.com. These include company mission, company vision, products and offerings, growth trajectory so far, employee size, national presence etc. Every new employee is also assigned a buddy ( a co-worked in his/her team) and HR partner to help the person in settling down faster.
What’s the best part about working in this environment that we won’t be able to see from just a walk around the office? Sumit Jain: We have very integrated teams that work in tandem with their counterparts nationally. We also do some cutting edge work and have been responsible for some the most appreciated and widely used features in the real estate space.
Are there special activities you do to promote teamwork? Are they voluntary? Sumit Jain: We regularly conduct team outings and team building activities which are voluntary.
What policies does the company have on day-to-day activities (e.g., dress code, work hours)? Sumit Jain: We offer our employees flexible work timings with defined core hours. Employees can come and leave office any time between 8 am to 8 pm so long as they clock 9 hours. We also provide work from home options. The dress code in office is casual.
Do supervisors have an open door policy or the employees need prior appointment for a meeting with the seniors? Sumit Jain: We follow an open door policy where employees do not need a prior appointment to meet seniors.
Is there an HR team to help the employees? Or is it driven by founders? Sumit Jain: We have a full-fledged HR team that engages with our employees.
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Here’s what employees speak about CommonFloor:
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How do you hire senior management? What’s the process like? What do you look for? Sumit Jain: We engage in senior management hiring through several modes like Panel Discussion, Assignment, Personal Interview and Personal meetings with other senior folks in the company. We look for Innovation process orientation and alignment to company culture and high achievement orientation in particular.
What has been the biggest learning that you’d want to share with fellow entrepreneurs? Sumit Jain: Perseverance and believing in oneself are the two most important things for any entrepreneur. So long as an entrepreneur is successful in resolving an issue for his/her customers and users he must have the perseverance and the confidence to keep going despite the challenges he/she faces.
How do you resolve team conflict? Could you share an example? Sumit Jain: We find open Forum discussion involving all concerned parties to be the most effective.
What tools do you use to enhance productivity? Sumit Jain: We believe that providing flexibility, work-life balance and clear goals helps in maximizing productivity. This reflects in our Flexi-timing and Work from Home policy, Extended Weekends and generous need based leaves policy and the usage of Balanced and clearly articulated Functional Score Cards for doing Goal Setting across roles.
What are some of the difficult decisions you have taken, as far as defining team culture is concerned? Sumit Jain: When we started our journey we were a small, young, dynamic and enthusiastic team. Today we have grown to become a team of over 800 employees. We have however ensured that the initial enthusiasm, entrepreneurship spirit and passion continues to be alive. We have maintained an open door policy and have taken all necessary steps and decisions to ensure it stays this way.
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Currently, CommonFloor is looking for potential candidates for its Bangalore office:
-Own the Product Management life cycle from product flow to wire frame, to rapid prototype,through all testing phases (alpha, beta) to the success of the final version.
-Define product requirements and overall go to market strategy.
-Define market requirements for current and future products by conducting market research supported by ongoing interaction with internal and external stakeholders
-Experience in intensive product/web application development
-Experience in leading teams, architecting scalable products, designing Databases and coding on web-based applications
-Experience in MVC, MySQL/MongoDB, PHP/Python, Object Oriented Programming
-Solid understanding of data structures and algorithms
-Conceptualize and execute the marketing plans and campaign plans for the brand, encompassing both ATL and BTL initiatives.
-Work on media plans and events
-Liaise with third party vendors and agencies on various brand activities and plans
-Track and monitor the competitive environment and market trends
-Minimum of 6+ year experience in Digital/Online Marketing and SEO with a focus on high quality organic link building.
-Proven track record of delivering tangible results on visibility, traffic and conversions
-Digital/Online Marketing and SEO with a focus on high quality organic link building
-Experience of doing SEO for large, dynamic websites is a plus
2012 May : #commonfloor was 70 people. April 2014 : 800.
The company has gone through several experiments, pivots and has been gaining ground. Recently Commonfloor raised 64 Crores in Series D.
In their first year CommonFloor voluntarily ignored funding. For three years between 2009 and 2011, the company functioned with a team of 20, mostly interns.
Eventually, CommonFloor became one of the startups that not only beat the recession, but used it to its advantage.
2012 May : 
