The web effect
- mydigitalfc.com, November 20, 2013
Real estate may be in a slump but online property portals are enjoying an upward swing
Up until a few years ago, when you wanted to buy property, a broker was your only source. Not anymore. Thanks to a host of online property portals that have come up in recent times, you can now sit in the comfort of your living room and surf the net for the home of your dreams. Really, real estate portals have evolved from being just online classified ad aggregators into marketing platforms and a major source for lead generation. They are also now one-stop shops for advice on prevailing rentals and prices, loan procedures, stamp duty, vaastu, decor, plumbing and a host of others issues relating to property and purchase.
Even as the slump in the real estate market continues, these portals claim they are growing at a scorching pace. So much so that some are even chalking out expansion plans to new cities and recruiting fresh field force. Experiencing a more than 100 per cent growth in revenues over the years, most portals are even hopeful of increasing that to fivefold in the foreseeable future.
"When the market is good, there is demand for information from buyers. When the market is down, the onus is on brokers to find buyers for properties. And brokers, who have transformed into professional entities, are the ones who take to portals. Therefore, there will be demand for portals in either market scenarios," says Advitiya Sharma, co-founder and marketing head, Housing. This portal, which entered the market in June 2012, has so far raised funds in three rounds, mainly for its expansion to new markets.
There are players like Tiger Global and Accel Partners, Canaan Partners, Mayfield Fund and InfoEdge who are active in this segment. The segment has also seen some consolidation - Delhi-based stock market consultancy firm, Sharetipsinfo, has acquired real estate portal, Propertymesh. Then, Indiaproperty raised funds from Canaan Partners & Mayfield after a de-merger from Matrimony.
"Speed and aggression are key factors for growth," says Sharma. His portal, which was earlier housing.co.in, has map-based search of the properties as its USP. It spent a 'good amount' on acquiring the new domain Housing and a common number for its call centre for pan India operations.
"There has been on no dearth of information on properties that are up for sale. However, verification of listings has been a challenge for end-users. We have evolved our business strategy to list only verified properties," says Sharma, adding that portals have also become a preferred platform for reaching out prospective NRI buyers.
Housing, which started out as a five-member team, has more than 600 people working for it across the cities now. Verifying details of the properties listed is a key agenda for them. "End-users feel assured with the listing of verified properties," Sharma said.
There are also other players like real estate marketplace HomeShikari that follows the verified listing model. The field staff visit the site to upload actual pictures of the site. Another player, roofontop, also a new entrant into the space, has Google Maps integrated with the property search. It gives out information like rent expected and per square foot price.
As add-ons, roofontop has a 'services' feature that lists architects, interior designers, electrical services, home loans and finance options. It has listings from Delhi and NCR and has plans to expand its operations to other cities as well. Besides, it also trains select brokers to deal with customers.
However, the recent incident where an advertiser from Mumbai discriminated prospective buyers on the basis of religion on the real estate portal, 99acres, brings out the perils of the user-generated content. "We are a platform or an intermediary and as per industry practice it is our responsibility to remove any illegal content from our site as soon as it comes to our notice. We are in the process of putting in place more rigorous checks and processes to prevent recurrence of such listings. We are deeply embarrassed that our site was misused in this manner," a statement from the company said.
Also, 99acres will evolve good practices advertising code for the real estate sector vis-a-vis religious prejudice and submit it to the Minorities Commission for consideration, it said. This code will include a glossary of terms to be avoided when advertising real estate online, the statement said, adding that the Sanjeev Bickchandani-led portal is introducing software filters to flag listings that have offensive content.
According to the portal's zonal manager at Hyderabad, Pavan Kumar Pathi, the zonal real estate sector is still largely unorganised and small builders as well as those taking up one-off projects depend on portals for finding buyers. For instance, 99acres is seeing about 8,000 clicks in Hyderabad alone. It has over 300,000 listing across cities and has recently launched a new feature on its portal to track new projects.
Improving accuracy and genuineness of property listings are issues that portals are besieged with, according to Pai of Magic Bricks. It is, therefore, hiring sales teams to reach tier-III towns and is also hiring talent for its product and engineering teams to drive innovations.
In an effort to enhance the property search experience on the internet, another portal, CommonFloor, has launched an augmented reality based-search app, called CommonFloor Real Estate, which has been fairly popular since its launch in March. This is useful in searching for properties and assessing the distance of the property to other landmarks. The portal has been seeing buying/selling on the site for the past several months. It is operating in Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad and Delhi/NCR as of now and will soon add Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Coimbatore, Jaipur and other cities.
The disclosures on the portal say it collects network information and metadata, IP address, date and time of access data identifying browser and operating system. It used a multi-factor authentication and key rotation and security policies to ensure that the data is safe. It further disclosed that it uses web analytics to optimise, personalise and make its services effective.
Data crunching and cloud capabilities are a key aspect with real estate portals. According to Sharma of Housing, the portal has set up a special data science lab for using the data it generated. Its analytics tools crawl for broader trends, comparison of projects and localities. It churns out lifestyle rating, reports of land values and trends, locality score, society score, connectivity score and neighbourhood score with this data.
For instance, it has recently announced a child-friendliness index for Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore giving weightage to schools, healthcare facilties and parks and their proximity to property sites. Mumbai scored well as the city is densely packed with schools and health care facilities. Suburbs ranked better on parks. Delhi showed a tendency to concentrate towards suburbs. Bangalore, with many parks and schools, scored in its south to south-west areas.
Similarly, Roofontop offers locality reviews, crime data, builder reviews and broker reviews for users to make an informed decision.
Incidentally, all these offerings are free for end-users and portals get revenues from subscriptions by brokers, advertisements, advisory and other value added services, including apartment management solutions.
