Do you live in a large housing society? How is your relationship with the Residents’ Welfare Association (RWA)? Is your society safe? You must be thinking why we are bombarding you with so many questions. Well, the reason is related to the two emerging community management platforms backed by the likes of Tiger Global and Google – Mygate and Nobrokerhood. Both of these startups are currently duking it out at the housing society gates, and sooner or later, it will affect you as well.
When it comes to running a resident welfare association (RWA), it is one of the toughest jobs in the world and certainly not for the faint-hearted. Some people see this as a ‘thankless job’ because managing residents’ expectations and the growing demands of metropolis-like societies everyday is not a piece of cake . Even the decision to choose a better community-management app becomes a matter of contention.
A few months back, the same thing happened with Raheja Vista Premiere, an apartment complex with over 300 flats in Pune. Residents of that complex made a big fuss to migrate from Mygate to Nobrokerhood. Both these apps have common features as they let security guards monitor visitors and manage the stream of people delivering food, groceries and other online purchases, reducing the time they wait at the main gate of the society. However, the one key difference between the two platforms is their pricing plans. Nobrokerhood offered for free what Raheja apartments was paying Rs 28,000 (US$337) a year for Mygate from the last three years. But RWAs and its residents are quite demanding.
Therefore, when Raheja’s residents found out that their new free solution came up with more ads, they started to get irked. In this, eight-year-old Mygate has been locking horns with a newly-launched and richer rival Nobrokerhood to protect its turf.
In 2018, the property search platform Nobroker launched Nobrokerhood which came up with a free plan to disrupt Mygate’s paid services. To take this rivalry up a notch, the new platform then offered to pay housing societies to adopt its product. With this move they wanted to reach 30,000 societies by the end of 2023.
Notably, over the last eight years, the average number of societies in India has almost doubled to 230 flats. So, the RWA members are now relying on the company softwares to effortlessly collect maintenance charges from residents and manage their accounts.
Nobrokerhood vs Mygate: Which One Is Better?
Both of these web-based deployment platforms are compatible with cellular devices and they can be used for various purposes. While Mygate offers the features such as help desk, inventory management, maintenance staff management and billing services, Nobrokerhood provides accounting, asset & property tracker, asset management, discussion forum and other such functionalities. If you belong to the industries like Real Estate, Tax and Visitors, Nobrokerhood is the right platform for you. However, MyGate is a better choice for ITEs.