Indiaproperty.com is India’s Largest Techno Smart Real Estate Marketplace, it’s a B2B and B2C platform, the only Indian industry player to have successfully trailed classified and open stack blended model for 10 years. It is India's first online assisted property buying portal that introduced 3D interactive virtual property tour feature in as early as 2014 something which their competitors are showcasing now. It also introduced India's first augmented reality based real estate mobile application and is ranked the no. 1 portal in the real estate space by Nasdaq-listed comScore Inc.
BWDisrupt talks to CEO, Mr. Ganesh Vasudevan, Indiaproperty.com to know more about its evolving business model.
Excerpts from a Exclusive Interview:
Tell us about your property site and its inception? Ans. Indiaproperty was founded in 2012 as a digital real estate marketing platform and has today evolved into a full stack player in residential real estate marketing, with monetised products on both the demand and supply side of the marketplace. We have over 8000 builders, 20000 projects advertised and over 700,000 properties listed on the site, and a monthly traffic of over 5 million hits. Indiaproperty is very strong in all four South Indian states, with a dominant revenue share, and has a presence in the west market. Over revenue has grown at a CAGR of 30% plus over the last 3 years, despite the challenges in sales that the real estate industry has been going through for the last few years. We pioneerd the first “Virtual Property Tours”, “Augmented Reality mobile app” and recently launched “Smart” point of sale terminals for experiential marketing of real estate. The full stack approach has helped us scale revenues in a very capital efficient manner and we are on track to breaking even operationally in the next 2-3 quarters.Our investors include JP Morgan Asset Management, Mayfield Fund and Bertelsmann India Investment the company has raised USD 29 million to date.
These tools are add-ons to listings and significantly enhance marketing ROI for the developer, and help us garner a larger share of the developers marketing wallet. Our ARPU per developer is more than 3x of some of our competitors in the south, and our solution ecosystem approach creates sticky relationships, resulting in 70%+ renewal rates with developers.
For buyers, we provide assisted buying as a paid subscription. This product significantly lowers the effort and time involved in buying homes. We are the only player to have built revenue streams on both the buy and sell side of the marketplace.
How will the technology and internet influence online real estate?Ans. Technology is transforming the way people search for properties and is converting the whole buying process into an experience. From simple classified listings now buyers can get all the possible information about the property, location etc. online. There are many online tools available today like online virtual tours, augmented reality search, virtual reality experiences linked to print media, smart terminals based experience centers etc. –which have minimized or eliminated the friction involved in the offline leg of the buyer’s purchase journey, bringing in efficiency and transparency in the system.
Some of these innovations have become industry benchmarks today.
For the builders digital is the most efficient marketing medium today. A print ad generates 15 to 20 enquiries and has a limited shelf life. However, an online ad has a longer shelf life, which means more exposure and leads which translates into more ROI. The cost of acquisition per prospect through digital is one-tenth of what it costs in print. Besides this, the digital medium proffers many creative and contextual opportunities for builders to start engaging conversations with prospective buyers, enhancing their brand messaging manifold. These are the prime drivers propelling the shift of real estate advertising spends from traditional media to digital media.
What is your current revenue and future growth plans?Ans. Developers account for nearly 70% of our revenues and the rest comes from brokers and individuals.We have over 20000 projects from about 8000 developers listed with us but this is just 25% of the universe of developers in the top 10 markets in India. Our focus will continue to be to drive category growth by getting more builders online, and increasing the share of digital in the total marketing spend of builders. A large part of our listings are paid and from south India, where we have the highest market share by revenue. We are also on track to being profitable in FY18. Once we achieve this, we intend expanding into other markets to replicate our full stack success.
What’s trending in India’s online property market?Virtual reality technologies and the experiences that can be built using them in the real estate context is trending. We have significant technology investments in building a scalable virtual experience platform and this feeds our omni-channel touchpoint experience- desktop, mobile and offline smart terminals. We pioneered in bringing in the first virtual property tours and augmented reality experiences way back in 2012-13, and have been successful in monetising these as products used by developers and agents in selling real estate. We intend to continue with these investments to enhance buyer and seller experience on the platform.
What are the new tech areas that IP is working on against competition?Ans. On the buyer experience side, we have launched “smart terminals” which are internet connected, remote experience centres, which developers can use to create digital touch points in an offline context. These terminals have been developed in house and we are working on gesture based technologies to drive the virtual reality experience. On the discovery side, we have built advanced algorithims to deliver a personalized and device agnostic experience for buyers. Our thinking here is to develop a deep understanding of the “soft aspects” of a buyer’s residential requirement using AI and Machine learning, and then sending out relevant answers to the buyer for use at his leisure. That is, the answers come to you as a buyer instead of you going out to seek them. We use the latest tools and a scalable tech stack that is used by leading consumer internet companies worldwide.
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Soumya is a young writer and journalist, with bachelors in Multimedia and Mass Communication. She is an alumini of the Asian College of Journalism, and finds politics and sustainability intriguing beats to work with.
