The online unbundling of the newspaper business is nothing new, but The Hindu has arrived rather late to the party. The publication has launched Roofandfloor.com, a real estate portal, nine years after Info Edge* launched 99Acres.com, eight years after competing publishing house The Times of India Group* launched MagicBricks.com. Early days for Roof and floor: the portal is Chennai focused, and according to Exchange4media, has 400 developers with almost 1000 new projects. The product itself is fairly simple, but interestingly, also includes a video route map. The site is clearly trying to get users to sign up, giving access to information on the neighborhood and the video route only after users sign up. On competition in the real estate segment 1. Business: 99Acres, as per the latest datasheet for Q1-FY14 from Info Edge, had 772,000 projects listed, with 603,000 paid listings. The company reported Rs 75.90 crore in revenue from the business in FY14, and an operating EBIDTA loss of Rs 4.8 crore. To be fair The Hindu has only just launched a site. 2. Funds: 99Acres claims to be the largest property site in India, and so does MagicBricks, but competition abounds, and is increasing, with more and more companies raising funds: - Commonfloor has raised over $17 million from Tiger Global and Accel Partners India. - Indiaproperty.com has raised $12 million from Bertelsmann and others. - Housing has raised almost $20 million till date, from Helion Venture Partners, Qualcomm Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners and others. - Accel Partners have backed SAIF Partners backed PropTiger - HT…
