Housing.com reintroduces rental section on its platform

After a long break of more than a year, online real estate portal Housing.com has reintroduced rentals section on its platform with over 60,000 listings. It aims to triple the inventory in the next three months.

Housing.com, which merged with Delhi-based PropTiger in January had suspended its rental division in November 2015, saying it was not able to monetize this section. This time, the company has returned with some additional features to enhance customer experience, the company said in a statement.

"Renting a house is the first step for most individuals towards living independently and eventually buying a home which makes it a critical part of the home-buying lifecycle. The reintroduction of rentals is a very strategic decision for us, both from a brand salience and business perspective. We are certain that this step will take us closer to our objective of becoming the preferred real estate platform for everyone looking for a home," said Mani Rangarajan, chief business officer of Housing.com.

While ‘Activity’ feature enables users to keep track of agents they contact and get feedback to ensure availability of listed homes, ‘Housing Assist’ is a personal guided search assistant, which will help track history and build a profile depending on users’ previous search results, thereby streamlining the process for future searches and reducing time.

There is still no clarity on how the company plans to make money from this segment. Although it said that this platform will contribute substantially to the overall traffic to the portal which is expected to touch 10 million by the end of FY 2018.