Square Yards helping Indian diaspora invest in domestic real estate market

NRI husband-wife duo Tanuj Shori and Kanika Gupta had a horrid experience of investing in the Indian real estate market for a very long time. They faced multiple problems when buying property in India. And they soon realised that there were hardly any professional players in the space, who would hand-hold them, guide them through the entire investing process, and  act as a benefactor to give them unbiased advice or provide them right information.

At that time, the duo used to discuss their problems a lot with other friends, who had faced similar situations at some point in time or other. Thus, in order to address this huge gap in the real estate space, the two entrepreneurs laid the foundation stone of Square Yards, a one stop solution for all property related needs, in November 2013.

The company’s sole aim is to establish right channels for NRIs across Indian Diaspora to invest in the domestic real estate market, help investors understand the potential of a property, guide them through the entire investment process, and provide constant support in terms of updates and exit strategies. Today, Square Yards is a $6 million company with offices in 5 countries and 14 cities in India.

Bootstrapping

The duo bootstrapped their venture, with an investment of $100,000, and has not yet tapped any private equity capital because they wanted to have enough control on direction of the firm, power to take required decisions and risks as intended. But with the target to achieve 100 times growth over the next five years, the duo are well aware of the fact that they would need to involve institutional capital at some stage to fuel their aggressive growth and expansion plans.

In just 15 months, Square Yards has become the second largest player in the residential market advisory segment in India. The firm has done large volume of sales of projects like WTC Gujarat, Ozone and many more totalling to a gross market value in excess of $250 million.

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“We have brought global properties like a motel project in North Dakota and student accommodation in Liverpool to our Indian clientele, who wished to broaden their investment horizons beyond India. Our clients list is growing day by day and we have become the preferred channel partners for most of the A grade developers around the world,” said Tanuj Shori, Founder and CEO, Square Yards.

“Thankfully, we have not faced any debilitating lows till date. We would like to penetrate more markets globally and have a strong online presence. We are working towards all this and more,” Shori adds further.

Learning experience

Shori had a fruitful career in equities and strategy during his successful stint (9 years) with Lehman Brothers and Nomura. He has worked across a host of sectors such as Banking, Real Estate, Construction, Commodities, Retail and Luxury brands.
He was regarded as an industry thought leader in each of these sectors. Both Lehman and Nomura gave him a brilliant platform to neutrally analyse various industries, compare business models, plan logical strategies and gain tremendous amount of learning experience working with CXOs of world’s biggest organisations.

Spending quality time with renowned business leaders helped him sharpen his outlook, overcome frailties and put equal balance on strategy as well as execution while running people’s business.

“One of the biggest takeaways from spending time with successful leaders was that success comes with humility and thus, I am trying to keep it very simple – focus on clients, employees by being approachable to everyone in the firm, and to keep an open mind and ears to critics as well as appreciators. We operate in a dynamic environment, and our ability to change our course as per market demand helps us being agile enough in executing our strategy,” shares Shori.

Connecting the dots

The entire real estate developer industry is looking forward to woo NRI investors. As per an analysis, a developer wants 25 per cent of its sales to be driven from NRI markets. With Square Yards’ presence in multiple countries, the company is trying to help trusted counterparts in achieving these targets.

Square Yards have more than 3,000 clients, both foreign and domestic, and the team is working with more than 500 developers around the world. On a monthly basis, the company tap about 100K new NRI clients, and are able to close 100 transactions every month from NRI markets.

Revenue Model

As one of the most diversified and trusted real estate consultant around the world, Square Yards is now planning to aggressively execute expansion strategy, which includes consolidation in real estate advisory, market leadership position for mortgage advisory, global project marketing and most importantly, introducing technology to grow and support advisory business.

Square Yards have close to 500 employees and the firm is planning to scale up to 2,000 by the end of this year. The company’s revenue in CY14 was $6 million and the firm did Gross Market Value (GMV) of $330 million globally in real estate transactions, out of which 25 per cent was from NRI markets and 25 per cent was from non-Indian real estate markets. The company is targeting $25 million in revenue for this year and is expected to cross $1 billion in GMV in CY15.