Housing.com Will Ditch Rentals & Listing Business; To Focus Only On Lucrative Home Buying & Selling; More Firings Expected
Slowly, but steadily, Housing.com is realizing that there is a huge gap between the limitless startup dreams and the actual reality.
After streamlining their operations, and quitting the commercial property space, short stays and land business, Housing.com is now ditching their core verticals: rentals and listing business as well. As per media reports, they will now focus only on the lucrative home buying and selling business, which generates maximum revenues for any real estate business.
In the month of August, Housing.com had laid off 600 employees, and drastically streamlined their operations. Within three months, this is their second major shake-up to improve revenues and reduce costs.
In an email, Housing.com CEO Jason Kothari said, “At a time in the economy where capital is limited, we are hard pressed but need to allocate 100% of our resources and mindshare on winning the BUY-SELL market. In addition, we need to be much more efficient with our resources.”
As operations are being scaled down, more layoffs are now being expected as well.
Is Housing.com Struggling for Revenues?
If we observe the email sent by CEO Jason, we will find that the focus is now entirely on revenues generation, as opposed to customer acquisition few months back.
Admitting the fact that rentals and listings business has no clear-cut revenue model, anywhere in the world, Jason wants to focus only on buy-sell niche as it has a proven business model, across the world.
He said, “There is no clear business model anywhere in the world that has successfully monetized rentals, while there is a proven business model in BUY-SELL..”
SoftBank had earlier made clear that further venture funds would only be provided once revenues starts to come in.
More Layoffs In Housing.com
The email accessed by ET has clear cut indication that the previous lay-off of 600 employees was not enough as more such firing would be executed to bring down costs.
Jason said, “.. I have a heavy heart that we will need to let some of our talented colleagues and friends go work elsewhere”
New hiring of those professionals, who are experts in revenue generation via advertisements can also take place, as Housing.com now wants to increase their profits by all means.
The earlier layoffs happened mainly across tier 2 and tier 3 cities, as they laser-focused only on urban areas.
After Rahul Yadav, the co-founder of Housing.com, who was the public face and the brain behind the real estate startup was fired in the month of July, things have been going downstream for this young organization. With further lay-offs, and streamlining of operations limited to just buy-sell niche, the excitement seems to be wearing off from Housing.com.
We will keep you updated as more details come in.
