Be ready for offline legwork for online property deals

The World Wide Web has made the entire inventory of the realty market available to buyers at the click of a mouse button! Recently while property consultancy JLL India held an Online Home Fest to help developers market their residential projects directly to home buyers over the internet, real estate portal Magicbricks.com just concluded its maiden e-auction for Birla Apple Aroma, a housing project in Bengaluru.

In this format, Buyers simply have to register, deposit some earnest money, and then bid for the units put up by the builder. Since more & more marketing action in real estate is beginning to happen online, customers are dictated to get savvy about this medium and learn how to use it to their advantage.

What is the online advantage?

Firstly, by doing your initial research over the internet, you can avoid interacting with brokers and builders’ salespersons and protect yourself from their aggressive sales pitch.

A property portal allows you to search for an appropriate property by location, price and size. You can explore the best deals, compare rates of similar properties in the same area, and study price trends without stepping outside the comfort of your home!

After zeroing in on five to seven developers, you can visit each builder’s website, where you can find detailed information on their projects, site and flat layout, specifications, progress of construction, completion date, elevation (what the project will look like post completion), etc. moreover, one can also download the price list and sales agreement, and request for a booking chart (which tells you which flats are available).

Quick and easy due diligence:

The internet is not only a source of information, but can also be used to do background checks on the builder. Buyers can figure out from Facebook, Twitter and real estate forums the opinion that past buyers have on a particular builder and his track record. Besides, one can also gather information about the builder’s quality of construction and infrastructure in past projects, level of maintenance and so on.

However, beware that developers push favourable reviews on the web using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques. Therefore, you need to be persistent and go beyond the first 10 searches to get a clearer picture. Home buyers can also run a search on court websites to look for cases pending against the builder if any.

Tata Housing plans to develop 20-mn sq/ft land in 8 cities

Tata Housing, the realty arm of Tata Sons plans to develop 20 million sq/ft land in eight cities in India which include Bengaluru, Delhi-NCR and Mumbai over the next few years. The company already has 29 projects and 70 million sq/ft land under various stages of planning and execution across 13 cities.

The managing director and chief executive Brotin Banerjee of Tata Housing told reporters,   “we have additional 20 million sq/ft land for development in the pipeline . We are in talks with the land owners in this connection.”

Speaking on the sidelines of a social cell initiative by Tata Housing where homes will be sold through Facebook in Goa ranging from Rs. 29 lakh to Rs. 50 lakh between October 26 – 28, he added that the additional 20 million sq ft land parcels throughout India will be developed in the course of next few years.

The company has already delivered 5,000 homes during the last 3-4 years and it plans to deliver another 4,000 homes in the remaining part of the current fiscal. “We will be launching four residential projects during October-December,” he added.