Selling real estate property online

In the era of internet when things are just click away; there are many traditional businesses which are facing tough competitions from those who have strong presence on internet. In present, real estate websites firms are making a daunting leap into e-commerce business. Snapdeal and Housing.com, both are backed by Japan’s Softbank, and now they are building technology and teams to sell real estate properties online to tap India’s billion-dollar real estate market.

To instill customer trust in high-risk environment, the companies are banking on wealth of data, brand recognition and offline partners. It is just because the lack of a focused realty technology product, which is selling real estate online hadn’t picked up. One of the Mumbai based company has sold 115 apartments online for Tata Value Homes and had generated the gross merchandise value of at Rs 50 crore over five days of period. One of the least website also launched a technology known as ‘Slice View’, which allows users to go through each floor of a building project; hovering over a particular flat shows availability and built-up area.

Business plan of Housing.com and Snapdeal to sale apartments online:

For current year, Housing.com already has 500 builder campaigns in the pipeline. According to Advitiya Sharma, who is co-founder of Housing.com, “Selling houses online isn’t an easy problem to solve”. Snapdeal, also have aggressive plan to sell new real estate projects on its website. The marketplace was the first to sell Tata Value Home projects online, in September. According to Amit Maheshwari, Vice-president at Snapdeal, “We are going very deep into the real estate category after capturing major market share in mobile phones to clothes and jewellery market”.

According to some of the experts, selling real estate property online is a different ball game, whereas; real estate transactions should be handled by the growing number of online real estate sites. The nature and function of consumer products and real estate is different and it is not in the match with Snapdeal’s core competence, said Sunil Wattal, who teaches management information systems at Temple University in the US. However; Amit Maheshwari, said that the differentiator for Snapdeal is its scale. “We will bring much more visibility and customer footfall to real estate developers. That translates into economies of scale and we pass over benefits to our customers.”

As per the Co-founder of Helion Venture Partners and a member on Housing.com’s board, Mr. Ashish Gupta, “Housing takes on some of a broker’s or agent’s responsibility, which is good because most people do not trust brokers or agents and technology can help to break these things.” However, not all realty websites are rushing to sell real estate properties online.”We will empower the customers with expert locality insights and exhaustive listings of properties,” said CommonFloor.com co-founder Sumit Jain.

3D preview of flats

Now you can have a three dimensional view of your wannabe residential flats as the developers have created a buzz with digital marketing and soft tools to induce the buyers. The developers and builders are using every tool in the kitty right from using drones to film new projects and thus offer a preview of how the flat will look like to the prospective buyer.

Already affected by the sagging sales, the developers have resorted to digital marketing tools to sell at least 2, 00,000 residential units during the October-December period, which translates for about 40 per cent of the annual sales. Industry watchers say developers are hoping to close as many deals by the year end as possible.

A host of builders are using 3D walkthroughs that help prospective buyers to visualise what they are going to buy. Speaking about the new approach, Advitiya Sharma, co-founder of Housing.com told a newspaper, “We have used drones to capture the view of a project from various angles. For a consumer, the Internet is the first point of enquiry and we want the experience to be good.”  This company, which counts Tata Housing and Rustomjee among its clients, says it has about 10,000 projects under its net. Several developers, including Tata Housing, Godrej, Mahindra, Wave and CHD already have a digital presence on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest. Tata Housing recently partnered with Snapdeal to sell homes online.

It may be noted that the businesses are moving towards new age marketing. Real estate is no exception. Nowadays referrals and word-of-mouth are becoming very critical for brand building and sustaining growth. This explains why social media and online presence have become very pertinent for real estate marketers, as they help them engage with prospective buyers, says A Harikesh, Senior Vice-President, Marketing & Sales, Tata Housing Development Company.

As per the data put out by the ASSOCHAM, its recent study found that realty firms spend about Rs 2,500 crore every year on publicity across different media and digital marketing accounts. Real estate portal CommonFloor.com has launched an augmented reality-based property search app called CommonFloor Real Estate, which also enables GPS-based map search and brings all its services to the mobile phone. If compared with traditional marketing like newspaper advertisements or billboards, digital advertisements are far cheaper and have a longer shelf life. Besides, industry watchers say that the shift to digital media is also helping developers cut costs by 10-15 per cent.