Acing online real estate battle

Virtual reality, chat bots, machine learning are helping firms deliver a differentiated UX

Buying a house is a big-ticket purchase and renting one is time-consuming. If not that, the real estate industry is weighed down with issues such as lack of trust and transparency. These challenges may appear more pronounced for online classified real estate players that do not enjoy one-to-one (face-to-face) communication with prospective buyers. In such a scenario, the key to winning in the online real estate space is to innovate using technology. With smooth interface, intuitive link flows, consistent and clear communication becoming hygiene, a number of players are looking at virtual reality, chat bots and machine learning to deliver a differentiated user experience to buyers.

Squareyards.com, a real estate aggregation and transaction portal, for instance, doesn’t see itself as a classifieds platform — that’s limiting. It offers a full stack online-to-offline solution to customers. It handholds home buyers through the entire journey — from initial search and discovery to final transaction closure and to personalised post-sales services till property possession. The portal attracts 700,000 visitors a month with a 1.2 million page views. It has 6,200 listed projects, 30,000 unit plans in 11 cities. 

“At the core of our offering lies in-depth data and strong ‘usable’ insights generated through analytics focused on user needs. Decision drivers — lifestyle, livability, connectivity, readiness, and value for money indices — are an example of this approach,” says Vivek Agarwal, co-founder, Squareyards.com.

Squareyards.com offers prospective buyers a micro-market research tool that leverages analytics and interactive heat-map-based visualisation to put a city’s real estate landscape at the user’s finger tips. Other innovations include a needs-based recommendations engine that provides scored and sorted projects and units based on user needs and unbiased algorithms. It maps the available property options on parameters such as price and size in a single view and identifies best-fit projects for a buyer. To facilitate transactions, it gets the entire project inventory online and buyers can block the desired unit and pay online. All this helps bring in transparency while delivering best-in-class user experience.

Likewise, PropTiger.com, which recently acquired Housing.com, is leveraging analytics to enhance buyer experience. The portal combines 3D technologies with virtual reality to offer visitors an immersive experience about the property. The idea here is to get rid of physical sample flats and replace it with the next generation flat visualisation. All this requires time to implement but buyers in this category are in no hurry to close a buy because a house is a big investment. “This gives us a unique opportunity to know the visitors on the platform better and provide a customised experience based on which part of their property buying or rent journey they are in,” asserts Ravi Bhushan, chief technology officer, PropTiger.com. The player boasts 6.5 million-plus monthly visitors across its key platforms including Housing.com, Makaan.com and PropTiger.com. It has 13,00,000-plus listed properties across Housing.com and Makaan.com.

It has built up huge capabilities in data mining which provides real-time insight on visitors. It has adopted a customer relationship platform that goes beyond regular lead and contact management to building more sophisticated technologies like lead prioritisation and optimal allocation, funnel prediction, and buyer segmentation.

According to Hemal Mehta, partner, Deloitte Haskin & Sells LLP, a large buyer population is the first-time home buyers. They are educated professionals and also tech-savvy. “They appreciate being updated about the project status. Real estate players are taking note of this buyer class’ expectations and using technology to provide services such as 360-degree view of projects and regular updates for individual properties using personalised apps.”

Real estate solutions provider, HDFC RED, too, values data mining. Taking personalisation to the next level, it has deployed a proprietary “Congruence Engine” which understands buyers’ preferences and utilises advanced machine learning techniques to suggest options which have a better fit to a user’s needs.

HDFC Red also offers unique search options such as “search by equated monthly installments” which display properties based on the approximate monthly savings one can manage. It has also integrated natural language processing on its platform. The “free text search” feature provides a humanised approach to searching homes by taking into account “spoken language” patterns. “We have strategically built our business on primary residential purchase that forms almost 70 per cent of the real estate market. We cover over 80 per cent of the relevant primary residential market in top cities,” says Sohel I S, chief executive officer, HDFC RED.

Its app launched in last July has crossed 15,000 downloads. With 3,700-plus developers on its platform it has over 8,000 new project listings.

At 99acres.com, the focus is on leveraging technology to make customer experience-rich and interactive with innovative products and services. With 5.2 million unique visitors per month and one million listings, it is in a unique position to showcase the best of the properties available to buyers. To improve transparency, the portal has introduced a feature, “compare projects”. “It enables buyers to compare various shortlisted projects on the basis of unique selling propositions, construction status, ‘ask’ price and the types of units available. This helps buyers take informed decisions,” points out Narasimha Jayakumar, chief business officer, 99acres.com.

Gaining Trust

• Technology deployment today goes beyond hygiene factors such as having a huge data bank and good navigation
• The primary aim is to overcome issues related to lack of trust and transparency
• New tech tools also help in delivering a differentiated buyer experience