Sudhir Pai, President, Magicbricks: The Transformation of the Property Entrance Industry in India

The Land buyer is presumably the most important purchaser strolling the essence of the earth. Furthermore, it's not only the acquisition of Property that makes this exchange significant; it is likewise the host of different costs that a property buy sets off that make this area one of the greatest ventures around. The housing market in the nation over is supposed to arrive at 250 billion bucks by 2023, up from 94 billion bucks in 2014.

And it’s not just the purchase of Property that makes this transaction valuable; it is also the host of other expenses that a property purchase triggers that make this sector one of the biggest industries around. Size apart, the property transaction is a very high-involvement purchase, probably amongst the Top 3 decisions that most consumers make in the course of a lifetime. While the real estate market has been a bit subdued in the past few years, underlying growth drivers remain strong.

There is an uptick in buyer sentiment with the clearing of the Real Estate Regulation Act. Therefore, the current sentiment notwithstanding, the long-term prospects for the industry continue to be bullish. It is in this valuable and exciting industry, that Property Portals are trying to usher in a quiet revolution in the purchase process. Driven by the high level of internet/mobile penetration in the country today, a large proportion of consumers today prefer to use a property portal to discover available properties.

As per a recent Google-KPMG study, as much as 76 percent of real estate purchase decisions were influenced by the internet. The Internet has put the customer in charge, and property portals have become the go-to medium when consumers begin their search process. The primary underlying reason driving this adoption is the aggregation of many properties on the portal. We estimate that more than 75 percent of all available properties are now advertised online, either by landlords/builders themselves or by agents representing the sellers.

The first step in property search is when consumers want to get a grasp of what kind of properties are available; what the prevailing prices are; what the locality-price trade-offs need to be done; and to thereafter be able to connect with sellers of properties that interest them. Thanks to an extensive scaling up of the portal platform, more than 4 lakh consumers make searches daily, scouring through over a million advertised properties, and makeover lakh connections with sellers across the country.

This extensive consumer adoption has in turn triggered a strong online adoption from the seller side too – over 10,000 builders, over 50,000 property agents, and over 2 Million landlords have used property portals in the past year. We’re in the midst of this exciting scale-up and are keeping an aggressive ambition to acquire every single available property and every available buyer and get them online. Consumers quite easily and in large numbers use the portal to discover listings of their choice to do the basic research and connect onwards with sellers, that too from the comfort of their homes.

The moot question at this stage is whether we can do more than just a discovery platform for consumers to use as the first step in their buying process. It’s important to constantly innovate and come up with a new value proposition that reflects how we can help consumers in a tech-driven marketplace, 

e.g:-

Can portals address several other touch-points such as aiding/making property site visits more effective?
Can portals leverage their information and analytics to aid the process of comparing and deciding between shortlisted properties?
Can portals leverage the extensive data on their platforms to enable better decision analytics and smarter home buying/selling decisions for buyers and landlords/brokers/builders alike?
Can portals develop software and leverage their platform that makes brokers more effective?

This process will thereby see the transformation of the property portal from being a ‘discovery platform’ into a platform that makes a much bigger, positive impact on the real estate buying process and on the industry as a whole.

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