Moneycontrol Bureau

Mumbai-based online realty platform, Housing.com, said it had "released its CEO Rahul Yadav with immediate effect" after it held a board meeting earlier today.

Yadav who is also the co-founder of the company, will no longer be an employee of Housing and be associated with the company in any manner, going forward, the company said in a release.

The company's board had taken note of his behaviour towards investors, ecosystem and the media and believed it was not "befitting of a CEO and detrimental to the company".

"While the search for an interim CEO is underway, a transition plan has been put in place," the release said. "The current senior executives of Housing will continue to run the operations on a daily basis, and ensure its continued smooth functioning. The Board and the Operating Committee will remain closely involved with all key decisions."

The colourful Yadav has been continuously in the limelight for the past several months.

In March, he got into a public spat with Shailendra Singh, MD at Sequoia Capital India, when he posted his email to the latter, in which he addressed him as "dude" and asked him to "stop messing around" with him. Yadav had accused Singh of trying to poach a few of Housing's employees.

Later, he got into a brawl with the Times of India group, accusing its Economic Times newspaper of slandering Housing.com. He indicated that this was because the ToI group ran its own property listings website (MagicBricks).

Then, amid reports the board was considering replacing him due to his various misdemeanours, the co-founder wrote a letter to his own company board (backed by investors such as Japan's SoftBank), which started with: "I don't think you guys are intellectually capable enough to have any sensible discussion anymore. This is something which I not just believe but can prove on your faces also!"

Yadav later offered to resigned but patched up with the board after apologizing.

Soon after, he made news for having gifted all his shares in Housing, amounting to about Rs 200 crore, to his employees, maintaining he was "too young to worry about money". He later also challenged his critics, Deepindar Goyal of Zomato and Bhavish Aggarwal of Ola, to do the same.

The final straw was likely day before yesterday when he wrote an e-mail to employees saying, "to have some fun", he had said both 'yes' and 'no' to different journalists who had called up to confirm reports of whether Housing was being taken over.

Interestingly, the Housing board had met yesterday too, where Yadav had rubbished rumours he would leave, and maintained that the company was looking at several acquisitions, in which he was looking to assume a 'Group CEO' kind of role.

(Posted by Nazim Khan)