In between buyers and sellers

CHENNAI: Buying a house is a dream that every person has. And when one is shelling out all of their life’s savings for such a dream house, it is only fair for them to want to get to know as much as possible about their prospects. PropStory picked up on that need of the customers. A concept that took birth in 2015 at a dining table went on to rake in revenues that one can only dream of in just two years since its launch. 

“We started off at a dining table — just a few friends and I were freelancing and trying to figure out what would work,” says Ashish Mahajan, founder of PropStory. He adds, “Because I had the experience of working in the real estate and the finance industry, we noticed that most customers who visited the real estate websites do not make a decision on the first visit. They researched on the Internet to know about the property. That’s where we entered.”

Ashish and his team began by gathering content initially for the blogs by personally visiting sites and checking out properties. “We were earlier called Indian Realty Bytes, because our blog consisted bytes from other customers, builders and ours as well so that there was every perspective being covered,” says Ashish. They were soon noticed by real estate developers who realised that this was the kind of attention they needed for selling their property.

“PropStory then turned into a real estate platform for developers and consumers that provided factual and objective information about the potential properties in a city. We served as a medium to get information across and the developers would pay us `5,000 to `10,000 per article depending on the project size. Our reliability helped us make a revenue of `35 lakh in the first year. By the second year, we made `2.8 crore. We then picked up an external capital of $1,20,000 from a few business acquaintances to expand to other cities,” says Ashish, an IIT-Mumbai alumni.

PropStory currently functions in seven cities including Benagluru, Chennai and Hyderabad. Ashish plans on expanding their quality of content and the media they use as well. “We are looking forward to using video content and other multimedia to share information rather than focusing on just written content. We also are planning to go for a B to B model soon from our current B to C model,” says Ashish.

In a nutshell
●    Launched in 2015, by Ashish Mahajan, PropStory was a garage start-up
●    Dabbling in real estate content marketing, the portal made `35 lakh in the first year alone
●    It raked in `2.8 crore 
in the second and is on its way to make twice that this financial year
●    PropStory plans on expanding its horizons in type of content and service model