Photo credit : microgen / 123RF.
India’s real estate sector has not been celebrating this festive season along with its billion people. Uncontrolled prices, high debt, millennials uninterested in forking out wads of money to buy a house – a host of problems have boiled down to this: there is a housing slump in the country, and it isn’t going away anytime soon.
The country’s real estate startups, however, have somewhat managed to buck the trend.
Inventory worth US$60 billion remains unsold in the top seven cities, research firm Tracxnsays in a recent report. But despite a slump in the real estate market, close to 300 startups have emerged in this sector since 2015. The pace of investment picked up with US$60 million invested in 20 deals in 2016, up from US$61 million in 30 deal rounds in 2015.
Photo credit: Haldane Martin.
Even apart from the biggies that deal in buying and selling, formats like co-working places and serviced apartments are gaining in popularity. The same goes for networking and networking collaboration among brokers, listing and marketplaces for service apartments, P2P (peer to peer) rental listings and marketplaces, and virtual reality-based visualization platforms. Read: no more dealing with shady landlords who say you are within “walking distance” to the market when in fact it is 5 kilometers away.
Here’s a list of the top movers and shakers in the sector in 2016, according to Tracxn.
Top deals
Online classifieds portal Quikr’s acquisition of Commonfloor is the biggest acquisition by deal size in this space. The other deals include Proptiger’s acquisition of Proprates and 3DPhy, MagicSpace by the Indiannetwork.in, Lifepad by Fellahomes and Properji’s acquisition by Times group-owned Magicbricks.
Top investment rounds
Online home rental startup Nestaway beat others with a US$30 million funding in all this year. Runners up were Housing (US$15 million), NoBroker (US$10 million), DoorKeys (US$2 million), and BHive Workspace (US$1 million).
Top investors
Photo credit: Pixabay.
Accel Partners (PropTiger, Commonfloor), Helion Venture Partners (Housing, Indiahomes.com), Tiger Global Management (NestAway), Saif Partners (NoBroker), and Foundation Capital (IndiaHomes.com) were the most active investors in this sector.
Co-working, yay!
BHIVE’s work space for startups.
Close to 60 co-working space companies have emerged till date in India, and around four companies, including BHive Workspace, Innov8, SpaceMunk, WiredHub, and Qdesq have secured funding. Delhi-based awfis is currently the most funded (US$10 million) player in this subsector, as per Tracxn.
