siliconindia | | December 20178THE OPPORTUNITIES FOR TECHNOLOGY DEPLOYMENT IN THE REAL ESTATE SECTORBy Rohit Gera, Managing Director, Gera DevelopmentsGera Developments is one of the leading real estate firms specialized in building & developing Prime Luxury Properties in Pune & Goa, along with offering five year warranty on real estate, seven day free look period, Community Creation, Innovation-led Products, and Re-measurement of property.T he real estate sector is amongst the most fragment-ed industries in the country where there have been vir-tually no barriers to entry for anybody wanting to become a real estate developer. The recent introduction of the real estate regulatory act (RERA) by the gov-ernment of India has changed some of this. The outcome of this act is that people will require developers to set aside far more capital for each proj-ect. It will also require on time de-livery and proper quality as there are penalties for delays and a five-year defect liability period as well.As the government pushes on improvement in our rankings by the World Bank on the Ease of Doing Business, the only way to break from 100 and get to 50 is to dramatically improve the ranking on the ease of dealing with construction permits which currently languishes at 181. All these dramatic changes have redefined the rules of the game for the real estate sector. Going forward, developers will have to rely on tech-nology on various counts. The brick and mortar real estate sector just as much as any other, is beginning to be swamped by the wave of technology. One can say that there is a gradual digital transformation taking place in the realty sector.Infact technological advancement in the realty sector has been around longer than one might think, although it is only in the last 2-3 years that we are now beginning to see the real im-pact of disruption that technologies are causing in the real estate indus-try. That is not to say that real estate has never embraced technology, of course it has, just perhaps not at the rapid pace that things are now starting to happen and which allow us to see and feel technological impacts more tangibly. The professional develop-ers are already implementing supply chain management and ERP systems from an enterprise mobility perspec-tive, technology has been deployed to improve designs and efficiencies but applications such as web-based or mobile to enhance customer inter-face or experience are gaining faster grounds. At Gera Developments, we have been investing in technology and currently, in addition to using SAP and Salesforce, we have two different apps that help us in delivering a better customer experience as well as a better product. Gera World - our customer facing app, consists of two different phases. The first being the pre-possession phase and the second is the post possession phase. During the pre-possession phase, customers have access to all their project related documents, they can schedule events such as site visits, agreement signing, registration they can also IN MY OPINION
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