Why is Quikr eyeing the online real estate segment?

Why is Quikr, a company that started as an online platform for buying and selling of used goods, betting on the real-estate segment?

Quikr has so far made two acquisitions in this segment – an analytics firm realtycompass and real-estate agent aggregator IRX. It is also close on heels of a third acquisition – Bangalore-based realty portal Commonfloor. The deal is expected to close within a week and is pegged at $200 million.

According to market experts, with acquisition of Commonfloor, Quikr will become the largest player in the online property segment and is all set to compete with vertical players like Magicbricks, Housing.com and 99acres.com.

“Real estate is a key category for us. We have been keenly developing some innovations that have the potential to reshape the market landscape,” said Pranay Chulet, Quikr’s Founder and CEO.

The value of real estate-related transactions is already about 50 per cent of all transactions on the platform, with the rest coming from segments like automobiles, jobs, services and customer-to-customer sales.

According to market experts, Quikr is on its way to becoming a vertical player in all the segments it is present in and wants to treat each of its businesses as a standalone enterprise. This change in strategy comes at a time when venture capital firms are inclined towards niche businesses.

Anand Lunia, founder of venture fund IndiaQuotient said more and more companies were changing their business strategy from being a horizontal player to a vertical one so that they can focus more on core business.

“This is being done to drive more revenues and also to create a brand identity,” Lunia added.

Quikr, which was valued at almost $1 billion during its last round of funding in April, is also focusing at the high-value game rather than the volume-driven business of used goods.

QuikrHomes, the real estate portal launched in September, is expected to fetch Quikr at least three times its present revenue.

It currently connects customers from over 1,000 cities and towns across India and it helps conclude 2 lakh-plus transactions a month.

Quikr gets its revenues from third-party advertisements, lead generation for car dealers and real estate brokers and paid listings by sellers. “With the Indian real estate marketing moving online to capture a $20 billion market coupled with our cross-category platform, we are uniquely positioned to capture the market share for our homes vertical. Quikr already had the largest number of individual-led listings for the real-estate category, especially in the metros, and had a very large number of real-estate developers marketing their projects, well before the idea of QuikrHomes was born,” Manish Sinha, Head of QuikrHomes had said.