Magicbricks with SBI did 'Seal the Deal’ to Encourage Investments in Real Estate

Founded in the year 2006, Magicbricks today has established itself as one of the property portal in India holding a mammoth market share of 40%. With monthly traffic exceeding 12 million visits and with an active base of over 14 lakh+ property listings, Magicbricks provides the largest platform for buyers and sellers of property to connect with each other in a clear, transparent manner. BWDisrupt spoke to Sudhir Pai, CEO, Magicbricks.com

Excerpts from the interview:
Magicbricks is available to the consumers through both, app and Web URL, offering extensive information about residential and commercial properties to Home buyers, Renters, Owners, Developers and Brokers. With a robust external online revenue growth of ~55% CAGR over FY11-FY16, MagicBricks has been branded as one of the fastest growing online property portal in the classified market. A proud moment for our company, Magicbricks announced on 30th January, 2017, a remarkable growth of 43% on Rs. 37 crore of the Q3 revenue, holding its ground of delivering a powerful Q3 performance. Our firm also reported YTD FY’17 revenues of Rs. 96.6 crore.

On consumer front also, Magicbricks has been consistent since mid 2014 on parameters like Total unique visitors as well as Total visits. If you see more recent numbers, then our market share has grown significantly, as per com Score data, Magicbricks had 41% traffic market share, by unique visitors, in the Jan-Nov’16 period. In this period, Magicbricks had 51% more unique visitors than the No 2 player.

Some of the key milestones of the company are:
• 2006 – Launch of Website
• 2011- Launch of Mobile site
• 2013 – Launch of Mobile App
• 2015 – Complete revamp of website
• 2016 – Launch of India’s First experience center

Unique key feature/services, how is it diff. from existing ones?
The driving force of Magicbrick’s popular reach is the fact that, it unlike other portals extends its service area beyond just search of properties, this makes us the true ‘Listings +’ portal. By Listings +, we mean today, Magicbricks offers exciting and innovative features such as: Forum, Prop-worth, Advice (rates and trends, calculators, locality overview), Luxury, Insider Club, Auctions.

Apart from all these, we have recently also launched the India’s first and Only Real Estate Experience Center. The Experience Center is a unique & beautiful amalgamation of the online & offline worlds thereby bridging an important gap that existed between a buyer & a seller. Using technologies like Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, on-demand Video-call and large format touchscreens, through Experience center, we have created a compelling proposition to address the myriad questions that plague a buyer during him home buying journey.

Our constant objective of innovating in terms of both products and services has made this search engine the first of its kind in the industry with many offerings.

We have in association with SBI, announced the launch of ‘Seal the Deal ‘campaign – the biggest ever online housing carnival of SBI approved projects in the country. The festival has kick started on Magicbricks portal on 1 February 2017. Under Seal the Deal, SBI and Magicbricks are hosting a mega online property show for exclusive SBI approved projects. Along with attractive offers from the builders, SBI will be offering home loans with moratorium on payment. Ensuring that consumers benefit from this great offer, customers will not have to pay EMI’s for 3 years, thereby making home buying affordable for everyone, and tying up with Prime Ministers agenda of “Making Housing affordable to all”.

What is your current funding status, monetization model and traction details?
Magicbrick’s mechanism of functioning is the Monetisation model. The platform is leveraged to generate majority of its revenue which is mostly from their builder advertisements and agent listings.
Further, we do not disclose our funding details.

Tell us about the Future plans you have in mind for the venture?
We envision establishing Magicbricks, as the undisputed Industry leader (Traffic, Listings, Contacts, Revenue and overall customer experience) in the near future. Our recent ventures such as MB Forum, Prop-worth and Advice not only provide one stop solutions to property purchases but also pride at providing an overall buying experience. Brokers often regard Magicbricks as a user’s paradise owing to the number of easy-to-use products available such as Broker Connect and Smart diary, designed specially to meet their needs.

We are continuously working on building innovative and new products and services to drive usage by further enhancing the buying and selling experience. Apart from this we have also launched a campaign with State Bank of India- Seal the Deal’ which would encourage prospective buyers to invest in real estate. Finally, we shall continue to build products and services that will delight both our consumers and clients.

Tell us about challenges faced in the online real estate sector and real estate in general.
The last four decades has seen the Real Estate sector in India evolve with extremely lucrative investment opportunities. Despite this, the industry with time continues to be cluttered and unorganized in both its digital and virtual buying-selling experience.

While the real estate portals offer listings on digital real estate platforms, they do not offer “beyond discovery” products, leaving the prospective buyer with limited available information. In today’s era of digitalization, these portals continue lending their preference to traditional mediums during the information sourcing process of a prospective buyer. This in turn leads to a lack of high quality images generated on these engines rendering vagueness to the whole process.

One of the key problems that usually a first time buyer who pays both- the EMI and rent faces is the lack of timely delivery. In fact, most of the buyers and sellers, owing to rampant spams, are reluctant to share their contact on digital platforms- making the procedure even more cumbersome.

Even though the sector witnessed a recent slow-down in transactions after the demonetization drive, business has finally picked up now. The industry henceforth is set to see a sea change with the slew of revolutionary policies being introduced like the RERA, Benami Transactions amendment, consolidation in developer space and weeding out of less professional developers/agents.

Please share your outlook for the year 2017 in brief?
We are looking forward to regulatory interventions like RERA, Benami Act and PMAY to push the industry from an unregulated, unorganized, fragmented sector to a more organized, predictable and regulated sector.

The industry, in the last few years, has been plagued with excess supply, sluggish demand, high but flattish prices, and unflattering performances. However, we must appreciate that, much like gold, Real Estate is seen to be an aspirational purchase and there continues to remain strong underlying growth drivers for the industry. These long-term drivers include- constant housing shortage, up-gradation, job creation, nuclear families and Urbanization.

2016 saw a marked shift of buying preference towards ready-to-move in homes. We expect this trend to further develop in 2017, thus setting well-advised focus on project execution which would make it easy for developers to sell homes closer to possession period.

Underlying latent demand for real-estates continue to remain high and with the predicted improvement in market sentiment during the course of this year, we believe that the buyers will resume their operating pattern. This is expected to have a positive rub-off in our business as well.

Can you tell us about the Market size & opportunities in the sector?
Online real estate classifieds market in India was close to 55-60 Mn USD in the year 2015. The industry is still in nascent stages and we expect it to reach $215-225 M by 2020. This is at a robust CAGR of 30%+.

A recent Industry report suggested that 65% of the Indian population, who are on the lookout for properties, include online search as an essential part of their buying process. With online portals increasingly gaining the well-deserved reputation of being the most efficient medium for search and discovery, this figure is likely to grow.

With online platforms evolving, three-fourth of the consumers flocking these portals are also likely to use them beyond the discovery phase for research, price comparisons, and for services in the buying/post-purchase phase. Digital is also likely to capture upwards of a 25% share of wallet across developers.