Nov 10, 2025

NoBroker: India-based rentals specialist hopes to go public in the next few years NoBroker sees 100,000 transactions monthly, 85% of them in rentals Company is still not profitable, but revenue is up and losses are down Adjacency services contribute 33% to 40% to NoBroker’s revenue BENGALURU — In a country where real estate sites have struggled to develop transactional products, NoBroker is building a dynamic business. It’s not without challenges and everything is unpredictable in India’s up-and-down economy, but its transactional property services are growing quickly. In fact, the company hopes to go public in the next few years, if the investment climate is favorable. The company is still not profitable, though revenue is growing. It’s focused on rental listings and leads for landlords, tenant services, and renovation products for homebuyers. We spoke to Akhil Gupta, the company’s co-founder and chief tech and product officer, at NoBroker’s office in the business district of Bengaluru. Founded in 2014, NoBroker was originally a search-and-discovery site that evolved into a real estate marketplace for rentals, financing, interior design, and other property-related services. In November 2021, it raised $210 million in a Series E funding round co-led by General Atlantic, Tiger Global, and Moore Strategic Ventures and achieved coveted “unicorn” status, valued at more than $1 billion. Rentals drive transactions NoBroker — whose model, as its name suggests, revolves around avoiding “middlemen / brokers” — has been especially successful in rentals. The company handles about 100,000 property transactions monthly, about 85% of them rentals. Only one in five real estate transactions in India is related to buying and selling, Gupta said. The company’s focus on removing brokers and agents from its business model provoked major issues. The business has faced several coordinated attacks from broker communities. “It was one of the scariest nights,” Gupta reminisced about Sept. 16, 2015, when the startup’s office in Bengaluru was attacked by a mob of more than 50 brokers. “We had to vacate that office and sit and work on several mattresses laid out in a residential villa for three months. We’ve come a long way since.” Adressing pain points NoBroker targets tenants wary of fees brokers charge — typically, a month’s rent — by offering subscription plans as low as INR1,650 + tax (about $19). Property owners place their listings on the site and NoBroker markets them and drives leads. “If more than 100 people show interest in their properties, owners would find it difficult to verify everyone, determine high-intent tenants, and schedule multiple meetings,” Gupta told the AIM Group. “Our relationship managers address such pain points, meeting the expectations of both buyers and sellers.” Currently, only about 5% to 6% of registered users on NoBroker pay for subscriptions. However, the company is now more focused on adjacent services, which have emerged as a reliable source of revenue with relatively low costs. The flip side of the NoBroker model is limited capacity to expand into the residential listings sector, where agents and brokerage businesses dominate. Very few Indians choose to sell by owner, or the FSBO approach. This also means NoBroker is not competing directly against major sites in the for-sale market, such as REA Group India, 99Acres, MagicBricks and Square Yards, giving it some flexibility on product and market share. NoBroker’s most direct competitor in rentals is Square Yards, a privately owned brokerage and listings hybrid. “The rental segment comes with unique business challenges,” Tanuj Shori, CEO and co-founder of Square Yards, told the AIM Group. “It is difficult to make money as an intermediary. However, we saw that the market lacked professional management of various challenges that owners face, so we developed Azuro property management. Azuro manages rentals on behalf of owners. It manages 2,500 houses today. The idea is to build long-term relationships with tenants and owners, rather than act as a broker.” Adjacency services in rentals NoBroker has expanded its services to tenants, who would often ask about rental agreements, cleaning, packing and moving services. “That’s when we began seeing the totality of customer journeys and transactions in real estate,” Gupta said. “Existing customers attributed a sense of trust to NoBroker, enabling us to leverage it to launch adjacency services. At the time, packing and moving services were highly fragmented, often advertised on wall posters and through word-of-mouth marketing. We brought price predictions to packing and moving.” On the homebuying front, the company received inbound queries about encumbrance certificates, financing, and residential interior design services, leading to the launch of design services. In April 2025, NoBroker expanded its interior design services to commercial properties — logical, because commercial interiors follow standard templates and execution, have bigger budgets, and involve quicker decisions than residential design, Gupta said. During the last decade, tech-savvy customers have realized that they can buy, sell, and rent a house without a broker, Gupta said: “Digitalization has translated to disintermediation,” he said. Revenue grows, losses still significant In the 12 months to March 2024 ( FY23-24 ), NoBroker’s operating revenue grew 32% year-on-year to INR8.0 billion ($91 million). The company lost INR4.1 billion ($46.5 million) in that fiscal year, a decline of 18.8% from the year before. High early losses are pretty standard for transaction-based businesses due to large marketing outlays and infrastructure investment. Square Yards, for example, reached profitability for the first time this year , in Q1 of FY25-26. Currently, adjacency services contribute 33% to 40% of NoBroker’s revenue. Gupta hopes costs will decline as the business reaches higher brand awareness and more Indian consumers flock to online products. NoBrokers is focusing its cost-cutting efforts on three areas: Increasing customer service delivery through Convozen, its in-house AI tool Neighborhood services, called NoBrokerHood Convozen: A purpose-built AI tool The company built Convozen to manage its contact-center capabilities. “We asked ourselves, ‘How do we ensure the same quality and adherence to in-house SOPs as we expand to 20-30 cities?’,” Gupta said. The tool monitors, audits and automates customer conversations. Though it was initially not meant for monetization, Convozen has since been offered to businesses across industries. Cars24, a used-car marketplace in India, played a key role in NoBroker’s decision to commercialize Convozen. When a Cars24 executive broached contact center AI during a casual discussion, Gupta said, he floated the possibility that Cars24 could adopt Convozen. Cars24 became one of the earliest customers. “Almost 100% of our consumer calls are now routed via Convozen, and it has truly helped us personalize every interaction,” said Gajendra Jangid, co-founder of Cars24. Another client is Zell Education, where Ankit Singh, VP of business development, said the company has a large team handling phone calls. “It isn’t easy to track everything, especially high-intent customers. It is also very difficult to monitor the quality of all calls, as quality checks are subjective. Audits cover barely 1% to 2% of the total conversations, while 99% of the calls are left to subjectivity. With Convozen, we now get summaries of all conversations, which gives us great control over what the teams are doing. Our lead-to-conversion rates have gone up by 6% to 7%.” Convozen handles 10,000 hours of calls daily for NoBroker. “It is now capable of creating multilingual WhatsApp agentic bots in 10 minutes, capable of close-to-human interactions and directly impacting the business bottom line,” Gupta told us. NoBrokerHood: Community management app Gated communities are on the rise in India, driven by growth in the urban middle class. NoBroker sees this as a high-potential market. Its NoBrokerHood mobile app provides services like visitor management, utility billing and surveillance, among others, to around 25,000 gated complexes in the country. NoBroker has been able to wrestle some market share from MyGate, the dominant community service in India, by initially offering the service for free. It later began paying cash-strapped residential welfare associations to implement the app with a lock-in period. NoBrokerHood reportedly paid up to INR1 million ($11,300) to mid-sized facilities (around 250 units). About 25% of NoBrokerHood’s 25,000 gated societies are switchovers, per a Ken report . NoBrokerHood has successfully tapped into budget-conscious communities, while MyGate continues to work with more upscale ones, Gupta said, adding that he believes NoBrokerHood and MyGate have equal market share overall. (We asked MyGate for comment but didn’t receive a response. MyGate launched its own property vertical, tied into its community management app, called Homes, in 2021 .) The race is far from over for both, as there are about 150,000 registered housing societies in India, Gupta said. Community management apps generate revenue through subscription services, and from external advertisements they facilitate on a society’s premises. Gupta said the app contributes about 20% of NoBroker’s overall revenue. Careful growth followed by an IPO? NoBroker currently operates in India’s 11 largest cities. Gupta said it knows how to expand into new areas, especially smaller, second-tier cities, but intends to bide its time, focusing more on profitability before scaling. “We have a good cash runway, and our cost of expansion is low. However, we are working toward profitability. Once all controls and processes are in place, we will certainly expand.” NoBroker could also go public in two to three years, Gupta said, depending on economic conditions and the company’s finances. “The conditions look good for an IPO today, with markets rewarding profitable companies,” he said. “We are seeing tech companies go public every other week, which is a remarkable feat. Startups also understand that they can’t keep burning money forever, that they will have to eventually provide returns to investors.” Industry still at an early stage He said full government implementation of a 2021 law, the “Model Tenancy Act,” could bring “much-needed regulatory clarity to the market.” He said land record management could be also improved, making real estate a more attractive asset class. Shori, of SquareYards, agreed there is still lots of runway for growth in the industry. “The size of the real estate sector is still very small compared to the size of the economy, and we believe that is where the opportunity lies,” he told us. “India also has one of the highest mortgage rates in the world. We would love to see the cost of borrowing down at 5% to 6% someday. That would help.” Search for: