While tying up with e-tailer Snapdeal last year for the sale of premium houses, Ratan Tata was sure that the investment would be testimony to the growing interest of established business houses in India’s burgeoning internet trade.

The property carnival by Snapdeal in association with its realty partner Tata Housing on June 5, 2015 witnessed the largest deal of Rs 1.1 crore.

Hours after commencing the online sale of Tata Housing’s premium and luxury apartments on its website, e-commerce major Snapdeal announced its biggest transaction worth Rs. 1.1 crore. The property festival has received an overwhelming response with more than 1800 enquiries.

Snapdeal Vice President for Fashion, FMCG and Real Estate, Amit Maheshwari said, “We offer an effective and economical channel for Tata Housing to reach its target group across India”. “Since the launch of the real estate category, we have focused on forging alliances with some of the most trusted names in the industry to provide a range of housing options to customers”, he added.

While Snapdeal has reaped success in online sale of real estate, the Co-founder & Managing Director of realty portal Shopsandhomes.com Rohit Dixit says, “Buying homes online is preferred only by large Investors who believe in a particular brand.  “ . “ The end user who purchases a flat with the motive of occupying it will never choose a property online, be it any trusted e-commerce gateway ”, he adds.

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.