Akshay Ruparelia is just your regular 19 year old millionaire from North East London. While moving with his family, he found that commission rates that estate agents charge in London are outrageous, charging up to 2-3% for the sale. Ruparelia wanted to change this, so he did as any 19 year old would do, he made a website. His website, Doorsteps, only charges 99 pounds, compared to an average of 10,000 pounds for an estate agent. After just over a year, the website is now worth 12 million pounds, which is just incredible. His first sale came from someone who just stumbled upon the website in East Sussex, after proving the model worked, the same person sold more land through the website. In total, he has sold 1,500 homes for 120 million pounds, saving people over 1 million pounds in fees.
Ruparelia’s endeavor is definitely proof that there is opportunity everywhere around us. This website was founded simply by him getting an idea while moving houses. The cool thing about this is that it is not an original idea necessarily as there are already estate agents selling property, Ruparelia is just making the process better for the person selling the house. I tend to think that entrepreneurship is strictly creating something brand new that the world has never seen before, but that is not what it is all about as we can see with this story. Entrepreneurship can be making an already known process better, like selling houses in London.
I think it is great how someone of this age was able to have so much success in this field. Real Estate is a very profitable and prominent market in the world today and I think it is very smart how he used this to his advantage and was able to build his own business through it.