siliconindia | | September 20179Today, buying a house is not just an investment; customers want to live the experience of buying a houseentire supply in the market. Today at any given point of time, we have more than 1.5 million property listings on our site. The main reason why most consumers have switched online for the purpose of buying, selling or rent-ing is the fact that at one go you can see all the available supply in the mar-ket. But do we buy property online? I don't think people will buy property in future because it is such a high in-volvement category and costs so much of money. You don't expect someone to press a button and buy property on-line. But still on a large scale, online real estate is a sizeable business.Today, we have completely new set of prospective home buyers who are high on digital content and with size-able disposable income more than ever before. This is the new set of investors, who will be driving the real estate. At any given point of time, around 65 percent of those buying a home come online at some stage of the process. We expect this number to shoot up, as three-fourth of the users will be using online as a more efficient medium for searching property. Increasing mobile internet penetration and awareness about real estate portals have also driv-en the number of users. But the challenge that remain for all the real estate portals is how to engage with this new set of informed prospec-tive buyers who are hard pressed for time in a fast paced world. Converting this challenge into opportunity, online real estate players have started inno-vating and have come up with custom-er centric products for each stage of the lifecycle of the home buying process. With technological advancements, on-line portals have become smart and the home buyer smarter. As the home buying process in-creasingly moves from offline to on-line, real estate portals are leaving no stone unturned. From innovative mar-keting strategies to using technology for providing an immersive solution to the customers, they are doing it all. According to a latest study by Google, more than half the real estate buys in 2014 were influenced by online search. And surprisingly, this was not restrict-ed to Metros but was prevalent in tier-2 cities as well.Today, buying a house is not just an investment. Customers want to live the experience of buying a house. Online players, who offer the best experience to consumers are the ones who would flourish. There is a tool for everything ­ be it for property discovery, under-standing the property worth, research, or for services during buying and/or post-purchase phase. All online real estate portals are sitting on billions of real time data points and are using the most advanced techniques of data sciences to bring in superlative experience, meaningful solutions and more transparency for the prospective home buyers. Data sci-ences are being used to drive credibil-ity of listings that weed out the prob-lem of fake listings that has plagued this industry for a long time. Portals are using data sciences to design tools that not only help the buyers define their exact needs but create the inex-pressible criteria that makes for the perfect home. The industry has realized that inno-vation is not a luxury any more, it is key to survival. Sensing this, the industry has embraced digital technology more than ever before to attract the prospec-tive home buyer. Property portals are now investing in Experience Centers, where customers are experiencing 3D floor plans; 360 degree views, immer-sive walkthroughs; HD videos and so on. This is the way ahead! Even developers have realized a strong growth potential in the digital space. Developers now want to lever-age the rich media experience which boosts their brand marketing efforts. We expect digital to capture more than 25 percent of the developer's market-ing purse and property portals will get a larger share of the pie. The good thing about real estate today is that the market is ripe for end users. The speculative buying behavior is gone. This provides an opportunity to all the online real estate players to increase involvement with the genuine investors in a meaningful way. Prasun Kumar
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