Real estate uses child friendliness index to attract buyers

After hotels started offering child-friendly features to attract customers, now it's the turn of real estate to use that index to get buyers and tenants. Apart from child friendliness index, real estate portals are trying to add a silver lining to the slow market by providing reliable information on interior decoration, movers and packers, legal services, and even pest control services. Leading this trend are portals such as Housing.com and Commonfloor.com.

These sites have been started by young entrepreneurs. According to experts, this is giving tough competition to other established players in the market.

“People want to assess/shortlist locations before going out and buying or renting a property. The new sites offer various services which a potential customer would like to have beforehand on his table. It makes house hunting task easier, which is why these sites are growing rapidly and more new sites will keep coming in,” an expert tracking the sector says.

The ‘Child Friendliness Index’, launched by map-based real estate portal Housing.com, will provide users all the information related to schools, parks and hospitals around the vicinity as well its proximity to the area with a rating attached to them – most child friendly, least child friendly and intermediate.

The index measures the vicinity on three different criteria -- the number of schools, hospitals and parks in an area, as well as the proximity of these facilities to the areas. It is currently available for three cities Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore, Advitiya Sharma, co-founder, Housing.com, told Business Standard.

On Commonfloor.com, which offers apartments/societies management software, also provides services related to home décor, health, education, home appliances amongst others for owners for the flats. And for RWAs (resident welfare associations), it offers a different set of services ranging from car dealers, rain water harvesting, interior design and others. The portal’s strong market is in Bangalore, though it is present in more than 120 cities with its apartment management software.

Sumit Jain, CEO, Commonfloor says,”Definitely, we are giving a competition to traditional portals. Ours is a platform where buyers can make the right decision.”

Housing.com also plans to provide 3D rendering for selling apartments in new projects by developers, which will allow buyers to have a whole picture of the area with zoom option and the vicinity as well through the site. 3D render will produce images based on three dimensional data stored within a computer.  

It already offers virtual tour of the apartments up for rent/sale on its site, where users can see the pictures of every room/kitchen/balcony in the house before making a decision. The portal is already live in 10 cities and plans to expand further across India. On the other hand, Commonfloor with a market place model, offers free site visits to the potential customers. It is present in 7 cities with offline presence and plans to expand to 11 cities soon.