India-based real estate portal NoBroker plans to expand its presence from six to 50 cities over the next three years.
Founded in 2014, NoBroker is — as its name suggests — a customer-facing real estate portal that connects owners and tenants directly, without intermediaries. Originally a search-and-discovery site, it has evolved into a marketplace for legal, financial and interior design services.
It currently attracts about 300,000 listings (rental and sales combined) every month and between 16 million and 18 million monthly active users.
In an interview with the Hindu newspaper, Saurabh Garg, co-founder and chief business officer of NoBroker, said that the expansion would initially focus on such cities as Kolkata, Surat and Ahmedabad.
“In all the existing cities, we see a good number of transactions happening — every month we do more than 60,000 rental transactions, around 5,500 transactions in resale and 500–600 in new homes,” Garg said.
However, in an apparent case of déjà vu, in Nov 2021 — when NoBroker closed a series E funding round that raised $210 million, valuing it at around $1.0 billion — Garg made a similarly ambitious assertion, telling TechCrunch that the company would expand to 50 cities in two-to-three years.
NoBroker recently expressed an interest in joining the ONDC (Open Network for Digital Commerce), an Indian government-backed initiative that aims to promote open networks for the exchange of goods and services in the country.
In March, NoBroker raised $5.0 million U.S. from Google as part of its extended Series E funding round. In May, it announced a partnership with fintech company AuctionBazaar to sell the non-performing assets of public sector banks.