QuikrHomes Launches Cashless Managed Rentals, Acquires Grabhouse
Starts Offering Managed Rentals That Involve No Cash Payments
Bangalore, November 21st, 2016 – QuikrHomes, India’s leading digital real estate business, today announced the launch of its cashless managed rentals solution with the acquisition of Grabhouse, India’s leading digitally-driven home rental solutions provider. This strategic move will help the company address an acute pain point in India’s real estate market with a solution that does not involve any cash payments. As part of this, Quikr will integrate Grabhouse’s products and technology stack into QuikrHomes while also reaping strong synergies the business has with its other verticals.
Founded by Prateek Shukla and Pankhuri Shrivastava in July 2013, Grabhouse offers end-to-end digital solutions for the rental needs of both owners and tenants. The platform offers a managed rental homes model which comprises of a range of fully furnished, ready-to-move-in apartments across 4 major cities. The managed rental homes model operates on top of a broader rental marketplace which offers the largest inventory of PGs and peer to peer rentals in India. The marketplace is present in 11 cities and has served 700,000 customers to date.
Talking about the acquisition, Atul Tewari, COO, Quikr said, “We are very excited about the launch of our managed rentals model – it brings convenience to consumers while eliminating cash from property rentals, and we are excited to start it with the acquisition of Grabhouse. Our business here will also benefit from unique competitive advantages as the Grabhouse target market has a great match with many of our other businesses such as C2C and bikes. On the cost side, the operational costs of the business will directly get shared with our services business.”
Grabhouse will continue operations as an independent brand for managed rental homes. As part of the overall integration process, its founders and entire team will move to the Quikr HQ.
Manish Sinha, Head of QuikrHomes further added, “Grabhouse will provide a deeper solution for our large rental supply and demand flow across QuikrHomes and Commonfloor. We already dominate this sector in the country – this will help us expand our solutions portfolio while addressing the real estate industry’s need to shift to cashless payments. And it will do this while helping a very large number of real estate owners and consumers.”.
“Quikr has built a phenomenal ecosystem for all kinds of buyers and sellers. Through its multiple verticals, Quikr caters to a large target audience which opens for us a sea of potential consumers and property owners. At Grabhouse we’ve laid the foundation of a sound cashless business model for house rentals. We foresee massive business opportunity now, as joining forces with Quikr means scaling quickly to build not just a long term rentals brand but also enter other new territories,” said Prateek & Pankhuri, Founders of Grabhouse.
With its verticalization strategy and pioneering technology-based innovations, Quikr has been growing both organically and inorganically. It has been steadily scaling each of its five verticals over the past couple of months and has also made other acquisitions to further accelerate its growth.
About Quikr
Quikr is India’s largest and broadest classifieds platform that is used by over 30 million unique users a month. It is present in 1000 cities in India and operates several large classifieds businesses across C2C, Cars, Education, Homes, Jobs and Services. Quikr is accessible across mobile app, mobile site as well as desktop, and allows consumers as well as small businesses to sell, buy, rent and find things across its multiple categories with great ease. Quikr’s investors include Tiger Global Management, Kinnevik, Warburg Pincus, Matrix Partners India, Norwest Venture Partners, Nokia Growth Partners, Steadview Capital, Omidyar Network, and Ebay Inc.
Visit www.quikr.com for more details.
About Grabhouse:
Grabhouse was started by Prateek Shukla and Pankhuri Shrivastava and aimed at using technology to solve real estate rentals problems. It is India’s first 100% broker free platform which lists houses, PGs in 11 cities across India directly by owners. The platform is largest inventory of PG. Grabhouse also runs a managed home marketplace called Cocoon, which is a network of fully furnished homes available for youngsters at affordable prices. The company has raised $10 million from Sequoia Capital and Kalaari Capital. It had earlier raised an angel round from India Quotient.