Hi, my name is Sitanshu and I am one of the co founders at Flathood. We started out in December 2015 and are currently present in South Delhi and Gurgaon. Initially, we were working in the managed home rental space but changed our business model and are now working with property dealers.
What we do: We are an online to offline real estate transaction platform. We are not a property listing website, we want to take care of the whole process i.e from discovery to completing the transaction
How are we doing it: We are making a broker-first platform. We work with a small network of dealers and help them in marketing their inventory. Right now we are doing this offline, and will formally launch it on our website in a month or so
Other Products: p2p listing platform called Flatmates.
Visit website: www.flathood.com
Problem that we are facing: Angel networks are just not interested in real estate. They want a “tech” product (for some reason having an app is called a tech product). Those who are in real estate will know that a pure tech is just not possible. Indian real estate is too localized and fragmented to work on a pure tech product.
What irritates me is that they have these big forms on their websites, you spend hours on filling them and then you get a reply “not interested in real estate”. I mean why can’t you have a look at the first slide of my pitch deck and THEN ask me to fill the form! Submitting deck on their websites is again a waste of time. You anyway have to reach out to them through LinkedIn / Referral. Why make a website in the first place?
Some people (who have ground knowledge about real estate) have told us that they like the idea but it’s too big and will take a lot of money. They want us to again make a tech product which can be sold off to 99acres / magicbricks.
And so here I am asking for help:
- Who should I reach out to and How? Traditional VCs and angel networks are just off the list.
- A lot of angel investors who I think would be interested do not respond to LinkedIn messages
- Hopefully, a real estate veteran can guide us not only for fundraising but mentoring us as well
Looking forward. Thank You!