siliconindia | | September 20178IN MY OPinionBy Prasun Kumar, Marketing-Head, Magicbricks Headquartered in Noida, Magicbricks is an online real estate platform that enables both buyers & sellers to locate properties of interest across India, and source information about all property related issues.T he government's bid to boost India's real estate in-dustry with a slew of policy reforms for its ambitious `Housing for All' by 2022 has put the focus on afford-able housing. There is a certain sense of renewed excitement around real es-tate now after few years of lull. Home buyers have already started to respond positively to the consistent reduction in the home loan rates and the other Cred-it Linked Subsidy Schemes (CLSS) re-leased by the National Housing Bank (NHB). Since February 2017, we have been witnessing a healthy spike of 40 percent in searches and around 30 per-cent hike in owner listings.Add to it, the latest FDI figures re-veal that there has been a significant jump in foreign investments flowing into India for real estate. In the last three years, FDI inflow has jumped to $60.08 billion from $36.05 billion in 2013-14. The timely intervention by the gov-ernment to boost India's real estate sec-tor has certainly provided all the online real estate players a great opportunity to innovate by providing holistic busi-ness solutions. The stage is now set for the online real estate players to up their game to graduate to the next level.The industry is still in its nascent stage and we expect it to reach $215-225 million by 2020 from what was a $55-60 million industry in 2015. The industry has been growing at a robust CAGR of 40 percent plus and the jour-ney has just begun.There is no doubt that online real estate portals have evolved with time from being listing services. If we look back 5-7 years, when portals were not big, the only credible source of infor-mation for buyers, sellers, or for the purpose of rent, was from the newspa-per classifieds or your neighborhood property agent. And chances were that as a consumer you may never get to know the information on the supply in the market. The great thing that portals have done is that they have aggregated the ONLINE PROPERTY PORTALS CHANGING THE REAL ESTATE PARADIGM
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