Housing.com chief marketing officer Pratik Seal resigns amid top deck rejig

NEW DELHI: Housing.com chief marketing officer Pratik Seal has resigned from the property listings website less than a year into his tenure.

Seal’s exit comes at a time when the Mumbai-based website is restructuring its top management and strategy team to focus more on product innovation and monetisation of its core business. During his stint at Housing, Seal was leading the “Look Up” marketing campaign, on which the portal spent .`150 crore of its funding.

Seal is now serving a two-month notice period, stepping out in November, Housing. com said.

“The company has already hired a new CMO and CFO who are scheduled to join in the next two weeks,” said one person directly aware of the matter.

Housing is already in talks with a clutch of strategic investors for a bigger round of funding, including with Chinese real estate portal SouFun. To ease capital need while talks progress, existing investor Softbank is set to back the company with at least $30 million in a ridge round of funding. In August, Housing appointed former Valiant Entertainment CEO as its chief business officer to drive the overall strategy and growth at the real estate portal.

After the ouster of its chief executive and founder Rahul Yadav earlier this year, Housing is managed by an executive committee that controls the finances and operations. The committee is led by Jonathan Bullock, the SoftBank executive on the board of Housing.



Rishabh Gupta, chief operating officer, is the interim CEO and is in charge of managing day to day operations. Last month, ET reported that Housing.com plans to lay off at least 600 employees in the next three months, as it steps up focus on its core technology and product, and tightens its cash burn.

Housing was founded in 2012 by a dozen college-mates from IIT-Mumbai. Four of them, including Yadav, have now left the company.

In three years, Housing has emerged as one of the Indian startup ecosystem’s prime success stories with $121 million in funding from revered venture capital firms including Softbank, Nexus Venture and Helion Partners.