Exclusive: Housing.com CMO quits to join Intuit India

Housing.com's chief marketing officer (CMO), Nikhil Rungta has quit the Mumbai-based startup to join Intuit India as its managing director. Rungta had joined housing.com, run by Locon Solutions Pvt. Ltd., from Reliance Jio in November last year.

Rungta has previously worked at Google, Yebhi.com, Yatra.com and McCann Erickson. In 2009, he was named Google's first India CMO, a position he held for four years.

Rungta's LinkedIn profile indicates that he started working with Intuit in September. An email sent to Rungta for a comment did not elicit any response at the time of writing this report.

Realty portal housing.com has been in the news for about two years now. From public potshots by then chief executive and co-founder Rahul Yadav, directed at the company's investors and board members, which led to his ouster later, to high cash burn. The once revered startup has been struggling to get back up on its feet.

Yadav later started an e-governance startup Intelligent Interfaces, which received undisclosed amount of funding from Flipkart founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal and cricketer Yuvraj Singh's YouWeCan, but fizzled out soon after.

After Yadav, Jason Kothari was appointed the chief executive of Housing.com in November 2015. Under his supervision, the company shut down a few verticals and decided to focus only on online property sale. It also withdrew from many cities and cut its workforce from around 2,000 to a little below 1,200.

In January, Housing, raised another $15 million from existing investor Softbank, bringing its total investment to $135 million. Its other investors include Nexus Venture Partners, Helion Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Snapdeal founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal.

Co-founder Advitiya Sharma quit housing.com in March this year to start his venture Genius Learning Lab, which is planning to start 500 technology-led 'micro schools' across five cities.

Prior to that, three other co-founders – Abhishek Anand, Ravish Naresh and Sanat Ghosh left housing.com to start a new venture.

Over the past year, multiple reports have appeared claiming housing.com is in talks with ecommerce giant Snapdeal and rival PropTiger for an acquisition.

Housing.com competes with MagicBricks and 99acres, besides a host of others including PropTiger. News Corp, which owns 30% of PropTiger, acquired Mosaic Media Ventures Pvt Ltd, the parent website.

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