COVID19 has Positive impact for NoBroker

Saurabh Garg, Co-Founder & CBO, NoBroker.com explains how they have leveraged technology  and how it proved beneficial in the pandemic

What are the business and operating models of NoBroker?

NoBroker is India’s leading online real estate platform that is 100% brokerage free. As the world’s largest P2P platform that connects property owners and tenants and property sellers and buyers directly by eliminating brokers or middlemen, it is currently operational in Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad and Delhi-NCR. It is a one stop shop for the entire home search journey of a user starting from home search for buying or renting to helping the user shift and also keep paying the rent seamlessly. It offers home services such as packers & movers, legal advisory, painting, cleaning, and interiors, among others

It has 4 product lines- NoBroker (for buying/selling and renting of properties, NoBroker Pay (to make rent and maintenance payments digitally through credit/debit cards, net banking and UPI wallets), NoBrokerHood (a visitor, society and payments management app for society residents) and Home-services (for painting, cleaning, repairs, interiors, etc.)

It is a freemium model where property owners can list their properties for free. Tenants can contact 9 owners for free. However, if they need assistance with renting, selling or buying properties, they can buy a subscription plan that best suits their needs at a minimal cost and NoBroker’s relationship managers can help them with faster closures.

Today, it has more than 85 lakh registered users across the cities it is present in.

What has been the impact of COVID19 on the business? How have you grown in the last 4 months?

The impact of COVID-19 can be seen across industries. However, for us it has been a more positive impact. People who were searching for properties through offline middlemen earlier, have realised that it is much more safer to access all of the relevant information about the property online on our platform. This saves them from the hassle of physical site visits and ensures that they stay safe and shortlist their dream homes even while being quarantined.

Also, we have been agile and innovative enough to make the lives of our customers as seamless and trouble-free as possible. For instance, in a bid to ensure compliance with social distancing guidelines, we helped our customers shortlist and finalise properties through video walkthroughs and e-meetings.

NoBrokerHood, our integrated visitor, society and payment management app recently partnered with ITC and BigBasket as soon as lockdown was announced to help society residents order daily essentials and groceries from the comfort of their homes. Similarly, we also associated with HDFC and SBI to make online rent and maintenance payments more rewarding for our customers through various cashback offers. For the ease of the residents and ensure theirsafety during current times, we have also added 5 new features on the app– touchless entry with face recognition, temperature checks for visitors, maintenance payment through NoBroker Pay, home chef to order hygienic food from within a society, and online grocery delivery store.

We have also started Comprehensive Property Management Services with uninterrupted rent on the platform for NRI property owners and owners who have a property in cities other than the ones they are residing in. It is a first of it is kind service where the platform manages all aspects of a property from maintenance, repair, renting out to a tenant, finding a new tenant if the previous one vacates, half-yearly inspections, and everything in between. The selling point of the service is that even if the property does not have a tenant for a couple of months, the owner continues to receive the rent from NoBroker uninterrupted. We charge a small fee from them for this.

While it was difficult for them to come down every time to rent out a property even before the pandemic, the subsequent lockdowns have exacerbated the situation further. The service that was launched just 2 months ago has become immensely popular already due to its unique value proposition.

In fact, our services have grown very fast during the on-going pandemic and we now need more hands to service and hence we are on a recruiting spree.

What are the features added in NoBrokerHood and how are these features geared up to ensure safety?

We strive to add new features on NoBrokerHood to add convenience to the lives of our customers. It is due to this vision that we have grown significantly, even during a crisis like COVID-19.

Online grocery store on the app: We partneredwith ITC and BigBasket to enable society residents to order daily essentials without having to step out and risk infection.

Touchless Entry: We have also introduced Touchless Entry to ensure ultimate safety and hygiene standards. Visitors such as domestic helps drivers, etc who make frequent entry and exits can now get a faster approval. Once their face is captured in the guards’ app, they can enter without biometric or manual approvals making the process hygienic, seamless, and secure all at once.

Temperature checks and face masks: All NoBrokerHood societies have mandated temperature checks and face masks at the entry. Guards will make a note of every person entering with/without masks on the app so that residents have a record of delivery agents, domestic help or any other visitors and refuse entry to anyone with symptoms.

Home chef: This is another unique feature on the NoBrokerHood app, through which residents who cannot cook at home and are reluctant to order from outside, can order home-cooked food from a home chef living in the same society. Similarly, if you are a good cook, you can use this app to promote and sell food services in your society.

Maintenance payments: Until now, tenants could make rent payments via NoBroker Pay. But now they can even make maintenance payments on the app. This feature is not restricted to residents of societies that use NoBroker Pay only but can be used by residents of any society. Since it is not safe to step out until now people had to withdraw cash to make maintenance, this feature comes in extremely handy and ensures that residents stay safe at home.

Live Patrol:  Committee members and residents cannot personally monitor if their security guards are checking every spot in the building society with many blocks and many miles to cover. With NoBrokerHood’s Live Patrol, residents and MC members can print out unique QR codes for the society. These QR codes are linked to latitudes and longitudes and QR code stickers can be placed at the matching locations. The feature uses geotagging and GPS on the guard devices, which means each scan has to match the geotagged location, and GPS will show if the guard is actually at that spot while taking the QR scan.

The security staff or guard on patrol has to scan each QR code on his beat. Committee members can even track the guard’s movement and see the time and date of each scan from the NoBrokerHood dashboard. This is a fool-proof method to ensure safety. If the guard tries to scan the QR code for the clubhouse in his cabin, or anywhere else, he will get an error message indicating wrong location.If there is anything that seems out of place, the guard can instantly take a picture and create an Incident Report.

What is your geographical presence now—across how many cities and covering how many properties?

We are the leaders in all the 6 cities that we are currently present in, that is, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Pune, Hyderabad, and Delhi-NCR. We save over 1200 Cr brokerage annually and witness over 300,000 annual transactions on our platform. We have about 35 lakh properties listed on our platform and more than 85 lac individuals have used NoBroker services hitherto.

What are the technology solutions used by NoBroker and what are their use cases?

Technology is the heart of NoBroker. As we do not have feet on the street model, we solve all customer problems using technology. For instance, when someone is looking for a property, we use our algorithms to find the best property  suited to the needs of the user basis the travel time (including traffic condition) which triangulates the best area between the office, their children’s school and their spouse’s office.

While closing the deals people want to check the right price of the property. As ours is a data driven transaction platform and not just a discovery platform, we have a lot of property data from closures. We use this data to predict the right rent of a property basis size, locality, BHK, time to close the property, etc. which is extremely useful for our customers.

We use ML to generate beautiful property descriptions instead of burdening owners to write it. These descriptions are very detailed with nearby schools, hospitals and other information (you cannot know until told that it is automatically generated).

We use ML and AI heavily to build solutions that solve pressing needs of our consumers.

We have a feature called Travel time search which helps people measure distance in time and not kilometres.

NoBroker’sLifescore feature helps users choose the best place to stay that helps reduce carbon footprint.

We use ML for image recognition to weed out irrelevant images shared by owners instead of employing resources to scan them manually.

We have enabled missed call and tenant/owner calling card on the app to increase the call pickup rates.

We have also enabled WhatsApp to simplify the process of property listing.

We enabled complete automation including checking the irrelevant properties.

We keep innovating as per the demands of time and circumstances. To help customers rent out a property during lockdown, while they were stuck at home we have started video walkthroughs.

How does NoBroker differentiate itself from other real estate platforms?

We are the onlyzero brokerage real estate platform in India that helps property owners and property seekers rent, buy and sell properties.  We use an algorithm to identify and eliminate brokers from infiltrating the platform. Since, we do not have any brokers on the platform our entire product has been designed so that the transaction can be closed. This clearly sets us apart from all other online players in the space. While most of them make property inventory available online, they do not ensure brokerage-free transactions.

Other than that, we also provide end-to-end home services such as packers & movers, legal advisory, painting, cleaning, and interiors, thus ensuring maximum benefit for customers under one roof.

How does NoBroker plan to utilize the $30mn investment from General Atlantic?

We are very customer centric company and all our efforts are to make sure that the customer’s journey is easy and seamless. We would be looking to invest in our technology and product to keep solving customer problems and make the entire real estate journey much simpler. We would be investing in our Rental/Buy services, Home Services, NoBroker Pay and NoBrokerHood verticals.

What are going to be your key focus areas and plans for expansion in the next 18-24 months?

We would be looking to go deeper in the cities that we are present in. Look to scale up our new cities Hyderabad and Delhi-NCR. We would be also looking to expand to new cities in the next 18-24 months.