Housing.com elevates co-founder Snehil Buxy as product head

Realty portal Housing.com has appointed co-founder Snehil Buxy as its chief product officer.

"Being one of the co-founders and a creator of the original Housing.com product, Snehil allows us to go back to our roots. With Snehil comes a deep understanding of the real estate market," said Jason Kothari, CEO, Housing.com in a statement.

Buxy, an IIT-Bombay alumnus, has been leading the company's front-end team besides overseeing different aspects of the business.

SoftBank-backed Housing.com was co-founded four years ago by Buxy, former CEO Rahul Yadav and 10 other IIT Bombay graduates in their final year. Yadav, the de-facto product lead at Housing.com, was sacked by the company last year.

The SoftBank-backed startup's troubles started when it rapidly expanded its operations and spent heavily on brand building under former CEO Yadav, leaving the company with cash reserve for hardly five-six months at the time of his controversial exit. This has forced the company to scale back its businesses and reduce workforce.

The total number of job cuts made by the company till date is believed to be more than 800 after the company recently announced that it would be laying off more people. The company has adopted a strategy to be leaner by bringing down the staff strength and focusing on the house purchase segment. It has decided to scale back house rental search and related businesses to focus on helping users on resale, new house purchase and home loans.

In November 2015, it had appointed Kothari as CEO. Besides Kothari, Housing recently brought in Mani Rangarajan as chief financial officer, Nikhil Rungta as chief marketing officer, Nandini Mehta as general counsel, Abhishek Hota as chief of staff and Keerthi Kiran as vice president, new real estate projects.

Housing.com has so far raised around $120 million from investors and is in talks for fresh funding.

The company competes with PropTiger and MagicBricks, besides other realty portals. News Corp, which acquired the parent of this website in March last year, has 30 per cent stake in PropTiger.