A month after firing its former CEO and co-founder Rahul Yadav, real estate services portal Housing.com is reportedly planning to cut 600 jobs over the next three months, as the company focuses on trimming its escalating costs.
"Housing is being completely restructured and performance for each employee across departments is being (scrutinised)," a senior executive of the company told The Economic Times. "While some people have been asked to leave because businesses are being shut down, others because of underperformance and in some cases due to overstaffing."
The company, which currently employs around 2,600 people, is looking to retrench 160 employees in noncore operations that it wants to exit, said a management representative of the company.
The Mumbai-based portal recently initiated several measures to raise revenues and improve its advertisement business. The company has closed its services related "commercial properties, short stays and land businesses."
The company has also shut down its operations in smaller cities and restructured its presence in large cities.
"The plan is to make the model much more skeletal. Internally, there is going to be a lot of churn on the product side as well," said a source close to the development.
The portal is firing underperforming employees in its engineering and product divisions and has served pink slips to staff who were recruited in operations division to expand its services to new cities, said another source.
Last month, the company appointed its current chief operating officer Rishabh Gupta as the interim chief executive officer of the company. Gupta, a former employee of domestic e-commerce firm Flipkart, has managed the company effectively during the controversies faced by Housing.com in the past few months.
Founded in 2012, the valuation of Housing.com stood at Rs.1,500 crore ($250 million) during its last round of funding, which saw an investment of $90 million from SoftBank in November last year. Helion Ventures, Nexus Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures are the other investors in the online real estate service provider.
