The Indian real estate sector contributes around 6-7% of India’s GDP and is projected to grow to 15-18% of GDP by 2030. In fact, its importance to the economy can be highlighted by the fact that it employs more than 18% of India’s workforce, making it the second-highest employment generator in India, after agriculture. Covid-19 was a minor setback to the sector, however most real estate segments have shown decent growth despite rising interest rates and geopolitical uncertainties. The residential real estate market has specifically been very robust with buyer preferences shifting to bigger and more spacious homes. Infact, India’s residential property market witnessed a record-breaking year in 2023, with the number of units sold also reaching 379,095 units.
In general, the demand for housing in India has been increasing with a growing population, urbanization and low penetration levels and the housing finance market has grown alongside it. The Indian housing loan market has grown at a 15% CAGR over the last decade from ~Rs 7 trillion in FY13 to ~Rs 28 trillion in FY23 with banks dominating it with a 68% market share (followed by housing finance companies at 31.1%, and NBFCs having a small 0.9% share)
Home loans are a high AOV product and customers often within such product categories need agents to assist in the financing process, as they are confused about which bank or financial institute would suit them and what documents would be required to process the loan. Hence, similar to developed markets like the UK and Australia, distribution of home loans in India is dominated by intermediaries including property brokers, dealers and agents, who control ~65% market share. These intermediaries can further be broken down into 3 types mainly segregated based on size: small agents, consolidators or large agents and traditional marketplaces.
Ambak is focusing on the 100,000 small agents in the market and building a B2B2C lending marketplace for these intermediaries (with plans to target other categories post home finance). Such small agents care about three critical issues- their income, faster turnaround times in order to not to lose customers and convenience to make their lives easier.
Traditionally, a majority of the small agents have been aggregated by either formal or informal consolidators, who in turn majorly deal directly with lending institutions. Hence, the 4 largest consolidators in India control ~20% of the home finance market through these agents. But these players use limited technology and are missing critical pieces that Ambak aims to solve- such as lack of visibility of customer file, low/untimely payouts, minimum cross sell opportunities, limited geographical coverage, lack of training support and low approval rates.
Ambak plans to build a solution centered around the agents, where the agent can just focus on sourcing customers and the Ambak platform solves for all other critical aspects of their business. The platform will have a large number of lenders present solving for coverage & approval rates, technology enabled systems to improve TAT, fraud rates, etc and have automated systems with better commission structures to solve for agent payouts. The founders have built out a clear go to market strategy to target specific customers, along with a solution to solve the problem of small agents.
Our belief in the team is reinforced due to the fact that Raghuveer has built a very similar solution at Policybazaar in the general insurance space earlier and Rameshwar has deep experience in the tech sector due to his previous stints as CTO at CarDekho and Freecharge. We believe the timing for such a solution is ideal, due to the existence of digital public infrastructure and digitisation in the real estate sector, which is leading to a large push within financial institutions to digitize the home loan process. We are very excited to partner with the team, who have known each other for some time and are ready to simplify home finance in India!
