NoBroker: turning a free listing into a paid service business

Context

NoBroker started in Bengaluru in 2013 with one promise: owners and tenants deal directly, and nobody pays brokerage. The founders, Amit Kumar Agarwal (CEO), Akhil Gupta (CTO) and Saurabh Garg (CBO), aimed at the rental market first, where brokerage is a standard cost of moving and where tenants churn often enough to keep coming back.

The idea earned investor backing fast. In November 2021 NoBroker raised $210 million in a round co-led by General Atlantic and Tiger Global, with Moore Strategic Ventures joining, at a $1 billion valuation. That made it India's first proptech unicorn and took total funding to $361 million, according to Business Today. At the time the company said it had served 16 million customers, had 75 lakh properties listed, and operated in six cities: Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi-NCR, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Pune.

Five years on, the story is less about the listing and more about what NoBroker sells around it. That shift is the useful part for anyone who runs a property business in India.

What they built

The core product is a listing portal where owners post rent and sale inventory for free and seekers browse it for free. The catch that pays the bills: people who want speed or hand-holding buy a paid subscription plan for assisted service. Entrackr's read of the FY24 filings shows ₹798 crore of NoBroker's ₹803 crore operating revenue came from subscriptions, with ₹5 crore from product sales.

Around that portal, NoBroker stacked services that follow the same customer through a move:

• Real estate services: rental agreements, registration and interiors.
• Financial services: home loan aggregation. Co-founder Saurabh Garg told Inc42 in July 2026 that this vertical grew about 2.5 times in a year and made up roughly 22.4% of FY26 revenue.
• Home services: packers and movers, cleaning, appliance repair and beauty, the latter now under a vertical called Zivora.
• NoBrokerHood: a society management app for apartment complexes, which puts NoBroker inside the daily routine of residents long after they have moved in.

On the tech side, NoBroker built much of its call-centre tooling in-house and in February 2025 spun it out as ConvoZen.AI, a conversational AI product sold to other companies. Business Today reported that it processes 10,000 hours of call transcription a day at NoBroker, supports nine Indian languages, and runs on a mix of external models (OpenAI, Llama, Gemini) and about 12 to 14 in-house models. The company cited external speech services costing ₹15 to ₹20 per minute as the reason to build its own stack. Named clients at launch included Cars24, LendingKart, LeapScholar and Tata AIG.

The numbers

Audited numbers lag, so read these with their dates.

FY24 (latest audited figures reported in the press):

• Operating revenue: ₹803 crore, up 32% from ₹609 crore in FY23.
• Total income including investment gains: ₹888 crore.
• Total expenses: ₹1,299 crore, up 9.2%.
• Employee costs: ₹436 crore. Miscellaneous expenses: ₹738 crore, which Entrackr notes is 57% of total spend with little breakdown.
• Net loss: ₹411 crore, down 19% from ₹506 crore in FY23.
• Cash on hand at March 2024: ₹55 crore, with current assets of ₹1,082 crore.
• NoBroker spent ₹1.62 for every rupee of operating revenue.

FY25 and FY26 (management statements, not yet audited filings):

• In a September 2026 PTI interview, CEO Amit Kumar Agarwal said revenue crossed ₹1,000 crore in FY26, with final numbers still under audit. He put FY25 at ₹965 crore against ₹888 crore the year before. ₹888 crore is FY24 total income, not operating revenue, so those two figures may not be like for like.
• He said losses fell 25 to 30% to about ₹300 crore. The report does not make clear whether that figure is FY25 or FY26.
• The company now targets profitability in 8 to 10 months. In February 2025 Akhil Gupta had put that target at 12 to 18 months; in July 2026 Saurabh Garg said 12 to 15 months.

Operating scale (company statements to Inc42, July 2026):

• More than 1 lakh real estate transactions in March 2026.
• 1.5 lakh home services orders in the same month, more than the real estate count.
• ₹1,000 crore of primary sales transactions processed in March 2026.
• Core real estate is 50 to 55% of revenue; financial and home services split the rest roughly equally.

NoBrokerHood, per the PTI report, serves more than 25,000 housing societies and 48 lakh families across 11 cities.

What worked, what broke

What worked

The free listing is a demand engine. Removing brokerage gave owners a reason to list directly and gave tenants a reason to start their search on NoBroker. That supply-demand loop is what every paid product sits on.

Monetising impatience, not access. NoBroker does not charge to see a listing. It charges people who want the deal done faster or with less effort. That kept the top of the funnel wide while still producing ₹798 crore of subscription revenue in FY24.

Following the customer after the deal. A tenant who finds a flat also needs an agreement, movers, maybe a loan, and later a cleaner. Each of those is a second sale to someone the company already acquired. By March 2026 home services orders outnumbered real estate transactions.

Building the tooling it leaned on most. A company that runs on phone calls built its own speech and call-quality stack, cut per-minute costs against outside vendors, and then sold that stack to others.

What broke, or has not worked yet

Cost discipline lagged growth. In FY24 NoBroker spent ₹1,299 crore to earn ₹803 crore of operating revenue. Losses have narrowed each year, but the profitability date has moved from "12 to 18 months" in early 2025 to "8 to 10 months" in September 2026.

Opaque spending. ₹738 crore of FY24 expenses sat under miscellaneous. Whatever that covers, it makes it hard for outsiders to judge where the money went.

The society app grew slower than planned. In November 2021 the company said NoBrokerHood would go from 10,000 to 1 lakh societies in two years. The latest figure, nearly five years later, is 25,000+.

Stretching across verticals. Inc42 notes that NoBroker now competes with Urban Company in home services, with MagicBricks and Housing.com in listings, and with Square Yards in loans. Home services in particular carry thin margins and heavy operations.

Geography stayed concentrated. Listings remain focused on the same six metros the company named in 2021.

How to apply this at your scale

You are not going to build a national portal, and you should not try. The part of NoBroker's playbook that transfers to a developer or a channel partner is simpler: own your inventory page and your enquiries, so you are not paying a middleman for every lead you could have received directly.

Most Indian CPs and mid-size developers today rely on the big portals for visibility. That works, but you pay per listing or per lead, the buyer sees your competitors on the same screen, and the contact data sits on someone else's server first. A focused listing website turns part of that spend into an asset you keep.

A practical way to start:

1. List only what you can actually sell. Keep inventory live, with RERA numbers, carpet area, floor, facing and price band. Remove sold units the same day. A short, accurate list converts better than a long stale one.
2. Keep the browse free and friction-light. NoBroker's lesson is to let people look without a gate. Ask for a phone number only when they want a site visit, a floor plan PDF or a callback.
3. Offer the next step, not just the listing. If you work with a home loan partner or a legal team for registration, show it on the unit page. Each one is a reason for the buyer to come back to you rather than to a portal.
4. Route every enquiry to one place. Whether it is a spreadsheet or a CRM, each lead should land with a source tag so you know which pages and projects pull buyers.
5. Watch the cost per closed deal, not the traffic. NoBroker's numbers show that growth without cost control keeps you in the red for years. Track what each channel costs against what it closes, and cut what does not pay.

A small, fast, accurate listing site will not replace the portals overnight. Over a year, it can take a real share of your enquiries off rented platforms and onto one you control.