HomePlanGuru.com: Ideas for your dream home
“The Fallen Tomato Cart” an article authored by Subroto Bagchi inspired this man to taste entrepreneurship. Having run his local tabloid at Nanganallur in Chennai and his college magazine at the Madras Institute of Technology, he had a head-start on using entrepreneurial skills to raise funds at an early age.
Though he has IT experience in Infosys for 8+ years and short career stints in USA and @ Cognizant & MindTree, the entrepreneur inside him gave him the guts to make the jump off the cliff, but with self imposed conditions like: my venture should add value to everyone in India; mine will not be just another services company; will not just be doing another job; it should be a legal and highly ethical business.
In the year 2004, he designed and built his own feature-rich house at a cost of Rs.700 per sq. ft., The Watcher buy but builders were charging upwards of Rs.1,200 per sq. ft. A back-of the envelope calculation showed that Rs.500 per sq. ft. is being sucked by the builder from your pocket in an invisible way. For a nominal 1000 sq. ft. basic house, the ‘extra’ benefit for the builder is a whopping Rs. 5 Lakhs.
“If proper planning is made at the micro level, you stand to get more for your money, if you find it difficult to do micro planning for your home, I am there to help you…”, tells Virupakshan, the founder of www.homeplanguru.com the self funded start-up from Chennai. Sam’s Lake move
In a scenario where most of us, while buying a house go by the blind reliability of a builder, here is a guy who is setting the mast to hoist the “AWARENESS” flag for buyers on quality aspects of a house to be looked into while buying the service of a builder.
Since the concepts of “quality aspects in buying a home” and “micro planning of construction activity” are hardly heard of, Virupa finds it a big challenge in convincing his customers. On the other hand, for the customers who are willing to implement the suggested changes, there is resistance from the builders on implementation of these quality concepts as it results in hitting their profit margin.
Running the company single handedly, Virupa claims it to be Number One with a niche offering that has no competitors. “Electrical switches come with 10 years warranty and plumbing items come with 7 years warranty…”, these are the facts being thrown out by Virupa, but most of us have never ever got to hear from a builder or plumber/electrician. He gives out services like “3D plan”, “Wall plan”, “Comfort plan”, “Safety plan”, “Futuristic plan”, etc., at charges ranging between 50 paisa and Rs.3 per sq. ft. Though this start-up is at an early stage, it already has 50 happy customers.
To complement his concepts, he is preparing a book titled:
“‘ABCD of getting your Dream Home…”
Though the economic slowdown is giving cold feet to many ventures, Virupa is in cloud nine since the market is bound to shift from being builder driven to a customer driven one.
His future plan is to reach customers throughout India apart from partnering with a good company to be a “Certifying Authority” for newly constructed houses. Having seen the quality of homes during during his career in USA, he is in a mission to make Indian Homes on par with developed countries in terms of comfort, safety and quality and at right cost.
Address:HomePlanGuru.com Virupakshan Krishnamoorthi
C-1, Raj Paris Apts, 82, Kamaraj Street,
Virugambakkam, Chennai - 600 092
Tel: +91 9840 847872
Contact: info@homeplanguru.com
Micro Blog: http://twitter.com/virupa
Network: www.Linkedin.com/in/virupakshan
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