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.

Housing.com buys online discussion forum IREF

Recently, a real estate portal Housing.com buys online discussion forum IREF (Indian Real Estate Forum) with a aim to provide and improve the content which can help the real estate investors and home buyers to make choices which and retain or attract the first time buyers in the retail real estate market.

This Mumbai-based real estate portal is financially backed by Japan’s SoftBank and after the deal it is expected that Housing.com will pay Rs 8 crore to acquire Indian Real Estate Forum that have a base of more than 1.5 lakh active users. Apart from that the first two acquisitions of company is expected to close in next one to two months.

In December 2014, Housing.com has  received a funding of about $ 90 million or Rs 560 crore from Japan’s SoftBank and after that they has set apart a corpus of Rs 200 crore for acquisitions. According to the officials of Housing.com, after the acquisition IREF will function  independently under the charge of Ravish Naresh who is a cofounder at Housing.com.

The forum is well known real estate platform for its unbiased and transparent project information’s, developers information’s, localities information’s, agents or brokers information’s, and plots information’s. According to officials of Housing.com we are in the last stage to acquire PropEquity and the deal is of Rs. 80 crore, but executive of PropEquity are saying that they have declined the deal.

While coming to desired changes in IREF, it is expected that there will be few changes in the section of IREF as Housing.com is planning to answer each and every query related to the builders, projects, brokers and agents. Whereas;, the Housing.com also planning to buy PropEquity, so that it can attract more and more business users as it is well known fact that PropEquity is a real estate data it its most of the clients are PE developers,investors and financial services who love to spot the market trends to generate the insights about real estate market.

SBI sells 130 properties

Country’s largest lender, State Bank of India could sell only about 130 properties in its e-auction of 300 assets to release just about Rs 100 crore.

As per the senior official of SBI, “we sold around 130 properties, largely residential through the e-auction process to release just Rs 100 crore: The more he added that SBI may sell all of the 100 residential properties it had put on the block. According to data, SBI had put on block around 300 properties with the worth Rs 1,200 crore including shops, factory buildings, offices and residential apartments which are spread across 25 cities including four major metro cities through an e-auction last Saturday, as they had put out a public notice on Thursday.

Due to heavy traffic one of the real estate portal which was assigned to carry out the auction, SBI had extended the time for auctions by an hour. This was one of the best innovative ways by any lender that has been fighting a long battle to contain bad loans, to dispose of distressed properties through an e-auction.

According to statement of PK Malhotra, who is Deputy Managing Director of SBI, “Due to heavy traffic on assigned real state portal for e-auction, the site has become slow and we don’t want anyone to miss the chance. Earlier, the bidding time was till 5 pm and we are now going to extend it by an hour” The process was conducted by e-procurement solutions providers C1 India and Auction Tiger.

Small sized property

Residential property sizes are reducing in all over MMR (Mumbai Metropolitan Region) from last two years because now real estate developers are constructing the small size apartments to target the middle and low income groups and keeping the price factor in mind. From 2012 to till now property size has decreased by 8 per cent and it is expected that it will continue as the population grows, property prices increase and most of the people are looking for affordable housing units.

After recent survey by real estate portal it is stated that “It is found that from 2012 property sizes have constantly decreased as prices have almost remained the same or marginally increased in last two years”. This particular trend was started in 2009, but because of huge success it becomes visible in last two years.

In present buyers are ready to compromise on the size of property, if the price falls in their budget and the location is hot. Another reason for the increased number of small-sized property is the affordability aspect. In Mumbai residential properties have seen a meteoric rise over the last few years, but still every individual aspires to own a home in Mumbai. Real estate developers are well aware about this fact and due to that they are working on affordability aspect of buyers and started to launch a property that are in small size.

Mumbai Metropolitan Region is witnessing a rapid growth of population over the last two decades. In world Mumbai is the seventh most populous city and it is in the league of Tokyo and New Delhi. Due to increase population the demand of property in Mumbai is more with the concern of available space. This can be the key contributor to the reducing property sizes because of low price.

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.

Earlier “Brokers” was the backbone of the real estate industry, but in last few decades the rise of internet and web entrepreneurs has bring the revolution in real estate industry with the platforms, which helps the potential property buyers to search for property according to their need and requirement without the help of brokers. As a buyer or regular internet user if you will visit and real estate portal, so you will see that they are helping you with a lot of information about multiple properties, but they are not more than any property databases. In present any potential property buyer need more flexible, authentic and user friendly platform, which can help the concerned clientele.

Search your property through Map:

ShopsandHomes.com is one of the most creative, innovative and effective real estate portal and now this portal has become a boon for customers, who are in search for real estate projects in Mumbai. This online portal offer the wide range of choices such as; new projects on sale, renting apartments, old apartments for sale, commercial properties for sale/lease , land for sale/lease and more. ShopsandHomes offers the multiple real estate options at single platform, and ensure the customers that they will get best result for their property related search.

If you are looking for property in specific area, so with ShopsandHomes.com the search get easy, as on ShopsandHomes.com you can easily locate the property in specific area. For example if you are relocated to Mumbai and are looking for some apartments on rent in Mumbai, so all you need to do just browse with ShopsandHomes.com and within few seconds you will get the “n” number of possible rented apartments in that specific area. After obtaining the desired result you can trace the location easily and get a lot of info about that desired property.

ShopsandHomes making your property search more precise:

Now, it’s all about location, ShopsandHomes has introduce the new creative way of showing results by the use of maps. If you will compare the traditional real estate portal and ShopsandHomes.com, so you will notice that this new real estate portal can show you results directly through the location map. With the help of maps, you will get the correct location of property and also you can understand and analyze neighborhood in addition to make you sure that what will be the distance between office and home. Here the use of map is very easy as Google Map in style, function and appearance.

Advance search help you to get more accurate result:

If you want more accurate result, so use advance search as a option as ShopsandHomes.com provides you wide range of sense making filters and with the help of that owner and the customer both can get the appropriate property and tenant respectively.

Authentic and reliable listing:

Team ShopsandHomes.com has implemented the best functions and features to make is more friendly real estate portal on internet and provide online real estate results to customer. Our portal ensures you that you will get the most authentic and verified result with the special formatting or information’s such as;   images, location, price, location and more. ShopsandHomes.com also provides you option to subscribe for post requirements and newsletters so that you can get the latest news and info in your inbox at weekly basis.

ShopsandHomes is getting the maximum marks on each function, which is required to be the best real estate portal on the web. In present it is one of the best and most comfortable portal find the rental, apartment, hostel, plots and more. So if you are looking for the property in Mumbai and want to get the best experience for property search, than browse with ShopsandHomes.com.