The proptech firm expects salon services to account for 40 per cent of its Home Services business within two years as it expands beyond property transactions and prioritises profitability before entering public markets
For more than a decade, NoBroker built its business by helping consumers buy, rent and manage homes without intermediaries. As the company prepares for a planned initial public offering (IPO), however, it is increasingly looking beyond property transactions and towards recurring consumer services to drive its next phase of growth.
The Bengaluru-based proptech firm has introduced Zivora, an at-home beauty and salon brand under its Home Services vertical, marking its entry into one of the fastest-growing segments of India’s organised home services market. While the launch may appear to be another category expansion, it reflects a broader strategy to build recurring, high-frequency consumer businesses alongside its core real estate operations.
The company expects salon services to contribute 25 per cent of its Home Services business within a year and 40 per cent within two years, making it one of the largest categories within the vertical.
“Salon is the biggest category, and there’s a reason for it. Women use it every second month, every third month, and hence the repeat rate is very high. Painting you will do once in five years or something, but this category repeats itself every second month, every third month. If you look at any other large player in the market, half of their revenue comes from salon,” Amit Kumar Agarwal, Founder and CEO, NoBroker, told BW Retail World.
Moving Beyond Brokerage
The salon business builds on a Home Services operation that NoBroker has quietly developed over the past five to six years. Today, the vertical spans plumbing, electrical work, painting, cleaning, carpentry, air-conditioner servicing and appliance repair, collectively handling between two lakh and 2.5 lakh service requests every month.
According to Agarwal, the operational complexity of sending thousands of professionals into customers’ homes every month convinced the company that service quality, not speed of expansion, would determine long-term success. Before introducing Zivora, NoBroker invested in dedicated training infrastructure in Bengaluru, hired experienced beauty professionals and conducted pilot programmes to standardise customer experience.
The company has deployed around 200 beauty professionals in Bengaluru, each required to hold Skill India certification or equivalent verified industry experience before undergoing an additional two-week training programme. The average order value currently stands at around Rs 1,250, positioning the offering alongside established organised players in the category.
According to Agarwal, the company’s real estate business currently contributes around 50 per cent of overall revenue, while financial services account for roughly 10 per cent. The balance comes from service-led businesses, including Home Services and Packers & Movers.
“Home services contribute a significant percentage of our overall revenue. I can’t give the exact number, but if real estate is 50 per cent, you can assume that in the rest, home services would contribute around 15 -20 per cent of overall NoBroker revenue,” Agarwal said.
According to the company’s FY24 regulatory filings, operating revenue rose 32 per cent year-on-year to Rs 803 crore, while net losses narrowed 19 per cent to Rs 411 crore from Rs 506 crore a year earlier. The company will file FY25 and FY26 by next month, in which Agarwal said that company have sustainable reduce around 30 per cent since last filing, adding that the growing would better reflect from newer business lines.
Entering A Crowded Market
NoBroker is entering a category where competition is already intense. The organised at-home beauty market is led by Urban Company, while players such as YesMadam and Snabbit have also expanded their presence through aggressive customer acquisition and service diversification. Rather than competing on discounts, however, NoBroker says it intends to leverage the customer ecosystem it has already built through its property platform.
. According to Agarwal, the platform has served around four crore cumulative customers over the past 12 years. In addition, its NoBrokerHood society management platform covers nearly 25,000 residential societies, representing an estimated half a crore homes.
Instead of investing heavily in paid marketing, the company plans to cross-sell salon services through the NoBroker app, NoBrokerHood communities, lift branding inside residential societies and resident WhatsApp groups.
“We are hoping that 50 per cent would be a repeat rate, and the rest of the customers we will acquire, but those will not be new customers; they will be NoBroker customers only, ” Agarwal said.
An Untapped Market
NoBroker believes the opportunity extends well beyond taking share from existing organised players. Based on the company’s analysis of households using its NoBrokerHood platform, only around 8 per cent have ever used organised home services, leaving the remaining 92 per cent dependent on neighbourhood providers.
“The reality is that the market is very under-penetrated from an organised perspective. The market is huge, and it is not about us competing with anyone else; everybody is trying to take this huge market. Customer behaviour is such that as time passes, more and more women want convenience, more and more women are working, and they have less time to travel to the salon and want this convenience at home,” Agarwal said.
The company has completed around 5,000 salon bookings within the first 10 days of launch in Bengaluru. Expansion to Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai and the National Capital Region will follow only after the company completes one lakh salon jobs in the city while maintaining a customer rating of 4.9.
“We want to ensure that customer experience is proven before we scale. Once we achieve both scale and quality in Bengaluru, we will take the service to the other metro markets,” Agarwal said.
The company said its focus over the next year is to expand salon services across its existing tier 1 markets while working towards overall profitability. Expansion into tier 2 cities will follow thereafter.
IPO After 10% EBITDA
Agarwal said all of the company’s operating business verticals, including Home Services, are now operationally profitable, with the remaining losses arising primarily from corporate overheads such as technology infrastructure, cloud costs and central functions.
The immediate priority, he said, is to eliminate those losses and turn the company profitable by around July next year. “Our objective is to become profitable by next July… “There is no revenue bar. We have already cleared that. We have to achieve 10 per cent EBITDA before we go for IPO,” he said.” he said.
“The objective is to aim for IPO, two to three years from today. There are two steps: one is to be profitable by next year, same time, July. The second is that after a year or a year and a half, we file for IPO.”
After achieving company-wide profitability, NoBroker plans to deepen its footprint before pursuing a public listing. The company intends to expand into Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Kolkata and Visakhapatnam, cities where it currently has no presence but sees significant potential, while also strengthening its presence across existing tier 1 markets.
To support that expansion, Agarwal said NoBroker may consider a pre-IPO funding round, although it has no immediate plans to raise fresh capital.
“I don’t think we would be looking for funding now. Perhaps around before IPO, a pre-IPO round would happen and perhaps that funds we can use for expansion into tier-two cities,” he said.
