Bangalore realty portal Housing.com is planning to lay off 600 employees of its 2,600 employees. This is done in the next three months as it the company is planning to work towards restructuring its business, cutting costs, focussing on its core technology and product and tightens its cash burn.
“Housing is being completely restructured and performance for each employee across departments is being surveyed, while some people have been asked to leave because businesses are being shut down, others because of under performance and in some cases due to over staffing” said a top executive at the company, which in July fired co-founder and former CEO Rahul Yadav for bad behavior.
A Source told that a few of the people working in these verticals have been asked to either move to the digital or tech teams, or quit. A management representative at Housing said that the company is laying off 160 employees in noncore businesses that it plans to shut. The three year experienced start-up employs in the engineering and product divisions too will be asked to leave.
The need to stem costs and reorient the strategy at the company follows months of internal turmoil which came to climax in the ouster of former chief executive officer Rahul Yadav. After the coming out of the troubles in its top management, Mumbai-based Housing.com has increased focus on revenue-generation and building an advertisement business.
“The plan is to make the model much more skeletal. Internally, there is going to be a lot of churn on the product side as well,” said one of the persons from development department. It has shut its commercial properties, short stays and land businesses and streamlined focus on large cities and towns while ceasing operations in smaller cities.
Housing is currently managed by an executive committee led by Jonathan Bullock that controls its finances and operations. Housing which competes with Common Floor, 99acres and Magic Bricks, owned by the publisher of this paper has so far raised more than Rs 760 crore ($120 million) in funding and is valued at over Rs 1,500 crore. It was founded in 2012 by a dozen college-mates from IIT-Mumbai. Four of them, including Yadav, have left the company after this happened.