Are you living in an apartment where you are yet to figure out who your next door neighbours are or need to instruct the plumber to visit your home to fix the leaky tap but the maintenance office is shut when you come back from work? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, CommonFloor.com is just the right platform for you.

Launched in 2007 by three IIT-Roorkee engineers — Sumit Jain, Lalit Mangal and Vikas Malpani — CommonFloor.com is an online service that combines property search, apartment management and vendor management and caters to a person’s complete residential requirements. Sumit Jain, one of the co-founders, says the idea to start the portal was to provide a platform where societies, gated communities and residents’ welfare associations could eliminate the need for a notice board and build an online community that fulfils all aspects of the consumers need around their home.

Ask Jain, what about societies or residents’ welfare associations that are using Google or Yahoo! groups to engage with others. He says, “We realised that residential societies were run by individuals who had full-time jobs as well. Many a time, lot of time went in tackling nitty-gritty issues like indexing, payment collection among others. With our portal, residential apartments can use technology to follow a community-based approach”.

Jain says unlike other groups that are restricted to sending and receiving emails, CommonFloor provides various other benefits such as a neighbourhood directory and residents’ profile.

He says CommonFloor’s software provides a management tool to exchange messages, categorise members’ database, add vendors and manage the finances of an RWA.

So how is CommonFloor different from real estate listing and classifieds. “Our aim is to be a one-stop destination for home-seekers, residents, association members and service providers,” Jain.

Mobile app

The six-year-old firm also said it has launched a mobile application for users with features such as map search using a phone camera. The company recently also raised series C funding of $7.5 million (Rs 45 crore) from their existing investors — American hedge fund Tiger Global and venture capital Accel India.

Jain says the funding was used primarily for setting up offices in multiple cities, enhancing technology and products, and expanding in existing markets. Currently, 64,000 apartment communities (or over 50 lakh flats) are using the portal.

He says the company has 400 employees. The premise behind the business model of the company is that it is free for residents’ welfare associations, but paid for businesses. It also rents out ad space on its Web site, and gets a commission from any deals via those advertisements.

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