Indians love property / real-estate as much as they love gold and
people. Business tycoons and earlier landlords in India are rich and famous
mainly because of trade AND real-estate. Bollywood, Tollywood and Kollywood
stars and producers became more rich due to investment in real-estate before
economic boom. All these real-estate deals were closed with help from brokers
or agents. But how does a middle-class person look for suitable property in a
known or unknown location?
In olden days, friends, family and relatives were the main agents to
trigger buying of real-estate property. They used to provide leads, influence
the buying decisions and also connect to the seller directly many a times. Over
a period of time, brokers or agents have taken active role and these middlemen
were helping widen the search operations in a given area. The quest was mainly
for a piece of land rather than a ready-made house. More food-grains can be
produced, super luxury cars can be manufactured according to needs and jobs can
be increased - but the land on earth remains constant ! (except in cases where
water bodies are covered and utilized for real-estate)
With scarcity in land in prime locations, high-rise apartments have
come into existence. Also, people started liking community culture - better
safety, amenities like swimming pool, club-house, play area, neighbors for
social interactions and friends for kids. With better economy, more jobs,
increase in disposable income, the ability to purchase a house or a flat has
grown by leaps and bounds. With assistance from banks and other financial
institutions, purchasing a house at early stage of a career on loans has become
commonplace. Obviously, this led to better growth of real-estate market.
Cut to modern times, people are travelling far-and-wide and their
investments are diversified even within real-estate. If I live in Chennai and I
am interested to buy a property in Coimbatore, how do I do that? I want to keep
a constant watch on property availability in an area within my living city, so
that I can buy a second property when there is a good bargain. How can I
accomplish that? I moved to a new city and looking for a house for rent. Where
do I go and search?
There are many a websites available for online property search in
India either replacing or supporting the existing business model around
real-estate. The first decade in the millennium has seen these sites mushroom
with similar business models.
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In most cases, the listing of a property and browsing / searching is
free. User can search for residential projects, commercial properties and land
for various purposes. There are ample parameters to search for these properties
- like minimum price, maximum price, locality, area and posting by owner,
builder or dealer. User can also look at photographs and videos of the
properties, which can help with buying-decision. Once the buyer identifies the property, he can get in touch with the seller and negotiate the deal offline.
Indiaproperty (which belongs
to the same group as bharatmatrimony)
was seen going aggressive in this segment with TV advertisements; I wonder if
they are able to pull more user traffic to their sites with such heavy
investments.
Magicbricks has adopted mobile
strategy with introduction of their iPhone and Android applications. The
feature that caught my attention with these applications is the ability to go
in the field and check the properties available in that area on a map. That is
what I call as being helpful. Of course I should have GPRS capability at least,
to get the location information. I am not sure why they are not publicizing
this important and useful feature in their advertisements. By the end of this
decade, this feature would become the basis for property search.
Homeshikari, from TTK brand,
has entered this domain recently but with a difference. There are no
advertisements on their site and the details are quite helpful. They provide
photos and videos of the properties as well as the floor plans with all
possible details. As they say, no one searches for a property just based on
city and direction; the search starts with the school for children, office for
the working professionals at home and nearby hospitals; they have pretty neat
integration with maps to provide similar search capability. Interesting they
advertise in local FM Radio !
I heard about Non-Resident Indians (NRI) relying on craigslist to sell or buy properties in India.
Lots of these property sites rely on displaying advertisements,
featured or sponsored projects and some property related services.
Even if the properties have come closer with technology, I do not
think the broker / agent based approach would do-away in India any time soon.
The reasons, I think, include:
- Lack of trust on the property listings on the site
- The sellers prefer to go through a broker as there are logistics issues involved; for example, if he stays in a different location and needs to show the house to visitors
- Not all properties are listed as the owners might not be Internet users
I would wait for the day when each and every property would be
tagged with an ID for easy identification. Once all the properties are tagged,
the government could take a snapshot on one fine day and say that the
properties are going to be tracked from that day onwards. All these real-estate
property sites should then be tagged with those identities for easy
verification. Is it possible to achieve this level of transparency with respect
to real-estate in India ever?
While speaking of transparency and good governance, I need to
mention about my recent finding. I came to know only recently that there is
something called 'MLC Graduates Constituency' in India. Any graduate can register with the
nearest local government administration. Once registered, the graduate can
participate in voting for a Member of Legislative Council (MLC) contesting in
that region. If you are a graduate, you can also register (I did) and make a
difference by electing the right candidate !
