Almost 65-70% of our customers come to us organically, without us doing any kind of marketing: Saurabh Garg, NoBroker

• NoBroker came into existence 7 years back when its founders had bad experiences with brokers.
• What started as a service in 2 cities has now expanded to 6, and the platform aims to reach out to the top 50 Indian cities in the next 3-4 years.
• We speak to Saurabh Garg, Co founder & CBO, NoBroker who talks to us about the platform’s journey so far and what the next few years will look like for the platform.

How many of you have rented, bought or sold a house and have absolutely hated the experience of paying brokerage? And if you are from places like Mumbai, chances are you have paid brokerage to the same broker for numerous years, even if you have not moved houses. For years, information asymmetry has forced many of us to unwillingly resort to using the services of brokers. It is this consumer problem that NoBroker identified and tried to solve by creating its platform over 7 years back, which came into existence from the personal experiences of the founding members.

Fast forward 7 years, NoBroker has now expanded from simply connecting buyers and sellers or homeowners and tenants to even offering services like painting, cleaning, Movers and Packers, Home Sanitization to even AC Service & Repair and Pest Control. It has also expanded to six major urban centers.

The platform is now looking at ringing in its next phase of growth and recently launched a high decibel campaign to educate people about its buy-sell proposition. “We have been around for around 7 years now and a lot of our growth has come from word-of-mouth. However, there is also latent demand. People hate paying brokerage, and that’s where we have come in, and addressed a pain-point almost all of us have gone through,” said Saurabh Garg, Co founder & CBO, NoBroker.

Today, the platform claims to handle $2 billion worth of transactions on its platform annually. “Currently, we do nearly 50,000 rental transactions every month and around 4,500 buy-sell transactions, which is a much larger number in comparison to most of our competitors,” shared Garg. For now, the platform wants to focus on its buy and sell offering and wants to grow the number manifold.

The campaign

While NoBroker had earlier released a rental campaign, it was primarily aimed at targeting home owners rather than people looking for rent. The platform, over the years, has used digital advertising more. It has also come up with a lot of regional communication. But with the current campaign, the aim is to talk to a larger audience.


“While word-of-mouth has been an important driver for us, the latent demand for our offerings has helped us carve a space for ourselves. We listened to our consumers and solved a problem they had been struggling with. Currently, almost 65-70% of our customers come to us organically, without us doing any kind of marketing which is a big advantage for us. However, we thought it was a good time to come up with the campaign because people still feel we are very large in the rental space, but we are now very large in buy and sell too. We do 4,500 transactions in buy and sell every month which almost amounts to Rs 3,000 crore worth of transactions every month. So our objective behind the campaign was to tell everyone that we are pretty big in the buy and sell segment too. NoBroker came into existence because we did not want people to pay brokerage, our aim was to make the process easier and more convenient. Our ad aims to introduce NoBroker as a friend who will help you buy and sell in a more hassle-free way,” explained Garg.

Expansion plans

When NoBroker had been launched, it had started as a website. A mobile app followed a few years later. It started its operations in two cities, Mumbai and Bangalore. From there, NoBroker is today present in 6 large cities. The aim is to grow its presence substantially in the next few years. “We think this problem related to brokers exists in the top 50 cities in India. So, in the next 3-4 years, we want to go to the top 50 cities and solve the problem across rental, resale, or new sales. We also think that our proposition of non-brokerage clubbed with a one-stop shop works really well because as you move to smaller cities, getting professional services is also a big problem. Services like painting, movers and packers etc play a critical role in the entire real-estate journey and we are trying to make it a painless process, a one-stop shop. Our aim is to make it as seamless for our consumers as possible. We also want to ensure that when someone is availing a service on our platform, there is a certain level of quality and it is done in a proper manner.

The future

NoBroker had announced in April last year that it had raised $30 million (Rs 230 crore) in its series D round of funding that was led by General Atlantic.

Right now, from a communication perspective, the platform will continue to talk about its increasing market share in the buy and sell segment. The aim is to increase the number of transactions drastically in the coming years. “The number of listings we have for buy and sell are much larger than a lot of other platforms. The task at hand for us is to make people aware of our play in the space and to figure out if we can take the 4500 closures to 3X that number in a year. We do resale and primary, which is also a very big business for us. So driving traction on sales and taking it from here to a very large business will be our key focus. Secondly, we want to keep on increasing our market share because when that happens, you are able to give more options to consumers, whether it is a buyer or tenant. So we will aim at going deeper into the cities. Thirdly, we will also focus on identifying pain-points and offering services to make the process easier for them. Over a period of time, we have realized that rent agreement, packers and movers and painting are pain-points, so we have added those services. People can also pay rent on our platform. So our endeavour would be to keep removing our consumers’ pain-points by adding important services so that we can make our consumers’ journey seamless. Also, NoBrokerhood, our society management app has also gained a lot of traction so that is also something we will keep investing on,” concluded Garg.