Housing.com to re-launch rental listings early next year

Housing.com is re-launching its rentals offering early next year that it shut down in 2015 to focus on home buying and selling.

The real-estate startup that has been in news for its in-house fighting and mud-slinging between founder, Rahul Yadav and investors has announced going back to its roots i.e. home renting in the wake of demonetization that is expected to have an adverse effect on real-estate.

"Although we had planned to restart rentals around the end of 2017, but the recent demonetization move has led us to advance our plans. We have started the preparations, and we look forward to an aggressive launch early next year,” said Housing CEO Jason Kothari.

Rentals had been one of the core areas for Housing since its inception in 2012. The company also claimed to be a leading player in that segment last year, before shutting it down in November.

Following this, Housing had restructured its business to focus on home buying and selling segment that is considered more lucrative because of the bigger ticket size of deals.

“Compared to last year, on a monthly basis, the company’s revenues have grown by 400 percent, operating costs have decreased by 70 percent, traffic has increased by more than 200 percent – growing from 1.3 million to 4.1 million – and the number of homes listed have increased <…> from 110,000 to 630,000,” the company said in a statement.

But now, Housing would like to give rentals another try. “Demonetization is expected to cause a slow-down in the home buying and selling segment, while it will likely spur growth in the home rentals space, making it an opportune time to relaunch the rentals business,” added Kothari.

With competition from likes of CommonFloor that merged with Quikr and MagicBricks, Housing probably knows now that it cannot afford to limit its offerings to continue its growth model.