Real Estate Tech in India - Forth Coming Investment Arena

Technology has become a part of major advancement for our day to day life. If we do a recap of our urban 24 hour schedule, we start our day with smart edge alarm clock waking you up, booking you a cab /shuttle to your office, having your emails, chats, WhatsApp over a smartphone and end of the day keeping check of your groceries stack, booking yourself a dining, or get food delivered to your home. Technology has made life easier, smarter and economical for most of us.

India is in the growth stage with 33 percent of population urbanised and with digital revolution, this number is continuously rising keeping the demand for development resource and employment opportunities. Real Estate is the backbone which supports the growth percentage, and technology is the factor that makes it achievable in reduced timeline. Let's try to understand the problem using an example for finding a home on rental in an urban city. Ritwick moved from Patna to Gurgaon in quest of better employment opportunity, and hence after spending some time in a guest house, his hunt for a rental home started. He picked the most traditional way of looking into listing platforms, spending hours to sort properties of his choice, further spending days with brokers to hunt for the property keeping in mind the factors of budget, amenities, location, furnishing and lastly finding an appropriate flatmates who can share the same with him. We avoid speaking about the nightmares of dealing with maintenance hassle or every property and exiting clause, in case you want to move out again! All this comes at a cost of heavy brokerage amount. Now let's see how this problem that existed since decades can have a solution with technology. What if Ritwick would have got Ready-to-move-in properties in real time basis, location of his choice, standardised amenities, apartments and villas, with friendly flatmates and for the amount equivalent only to his room? Did I mention Brokerage? No, because there no human intervention required; hence there is no brokerage. All these are too good to believe and these scenarios are possible with the help of technology today and yes, it’s happening right now at this moment. To name among few, Nest away, Ziffy Homes and Housing are few such platforms which leverage technology to provide advanced solutions in Real Estate Sector.

Speaking about the market size, we have $4 billion revenue on annual paid to brokerage firms in urban cities, around $15 billion rental amount paid on annual basis and total Real Estate transaction is expected to touch $180 billion by 2020. This size of demand to be catered eventually attracts investments from sources within India and foreign investment firms. Technology driven platform helps not only to consolidate the transactions but also to provide you insights on the basis of your historical transactions at a given point of time. Consolidation of transactional data gives an opportunity to devise a machine learning algorithm which helps to deduce appropriate value appreciation of your property, your investment and your rental amount on any real estate investments.

A cutting edge technology is the breakthrough for exponential growth pattern as required it in the real estate sector, but let's see how the investment economics work. You build an awesome technology which really solves the problem that exists. Now using the same technology you have a steady income on month on month basis. To scale this product with the market opportunity, technology would require investment and execution specialists who are able to sell the product, eventually your business grows only if people buy it or you have enough traction for marketing opportunities. Either of the cases has enough cash flow that required to scale for exponential growth and hence you generate a cash burn (Cash burn = profit you generate over all expenses of the company) with the projection to calculate the time you breakeven (when your cash burn = zero). Let's assume in the best case scenario you break even in 18 months, and then from 19th month on wards you start making actual profits. But there is a catch! If you are really doing that good with your projections and technology, then even before you breakeven you would be ready to take another investment with a higher valuation. Investments are undoubtedly the most effective way to scale your business exponentially in a very short span of time and provide a high return to Investors as they grow (their money to be more precise) the same way company grows.

Technology is disruption and eventually as it’s been said by 2030, we would have self-driven cars in India to travel driverless from Point A to Point B. Similarly, technology in Real Estate would enable a fully autonomous hyper city operating without human intervention to become a reality! The component of innovation and investment go hand by hand to make this world a better place, and India is considered as one of the most emerging market for foreign direct investments along with several digitalization initiatives as recommended from government of India to further make investments more attractive in terms of ROI. Consumerism in India is also advancing for convenience and acceptability towards technology (like smart phones, higher internet connectivity, more online users, or others) which is proving Indian consumers as most promising economy towards acceptability of digitalization.

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