The proptech company recently became India's first unicorn in the space by directly connecting property owners with property seekers. But can real estate brokers, ubiquitous in India, really be eliminated from deal-making?
(L-R) Saurabh Garg, co-founder and Chief Business officer and Amit Agarwal, co-founder and Chief executive officer NoBroker.com
Image: Hemant Mishra for Forbes India
Sometime in mid-2015, when Amit Agarwal was chatting with his co-founder Akhil Gupta at NoBroker’s Bengaluru office, he noticed through the windows a mob of angry men heading towards them. He brushed it off as a regular “morcha” or protest and carried on his conversation. Minutes later, he was interrupted when that mob started banging on their office doors and breaking the glass windows. Around 50 of them—all real estate brokers—barged into the then one-year-old startup’s office, pulled the plugs on the computers and physically attacked the team. “It was a scary experience,” says Gupta, 40. “But it also marked a turning point for us because it was then that we realised that we are truly disrupting the industry.”
Set in early 2014, NoBroker, as the name implies, connects landlords, tenants, buyer and sellers directly with each other without a broker in between. It was a radical concept in India –and worldwide—at the time where brokers are seen as indispensable. Startups such as 99acres, Softbank-backed Housing.com and MagicBricks—the so-called property tech, or proptech players—were beginning to make their mark in India’s burgeoning real estate industry but none dispensed with brokers. They enlisted the latter on their portals and gave them access to customers. Similarly, in the US and China, no such broker-free proptech player existed.