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.

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.