It’s a crowded space. People looking to buy or rent accommodation are increasingly turning to the Internet to get information on homes. For 24-year-old Ananya Saha, a journalist with Impact Magazine, relocating from New Delhi to Mumbai wasn’t as stressful as it could have been. Before shifting, Saha spent more than two weeks browsing real estate websites. She gleaned information about brokers and went through one of them to rent an apartment in a Mumbai suburb.
Myrtle Maxwell, a coaching institute principal from Kollam, Kerala, wanted to sell her 775sq. ft Mumbai apartment but didn’t have any knowledge about the current real estate market. Her brother, Donald Dcruez, who had put up his Mumbai apartment for rent and found a tenant by placing an advertisement on a real estate website, asked Maxwell to take the same route. Maxwell placed an advertisement on www.99.acres.com, owned by Info Edge (India) Ltd. Within a week, she was inundated with calls from prospective buyers and brokers and hopes to finalize a sale soon.
Real estate portals with national reach, such as 99acres.com, Magicbricks.com and Indiaproperty.com, which were mostly launched in the last two years, have come as a blessing for people such as Saha and Maxwell. According to San Francisco-based Alexa.com, which monitors Internet use, Indiaproperty, 99acres, Magicbricks and Indiaproperties are among the top players in the field in terms of daily reach.
New players are entering the business, with Mumbai-based People Interactive (I) Pvt. Ltd, which runs the matrimonial portal, Shaadi.com, planning to launch a real estate portal, 2bhk.com, soon.
Naresh Malkani, a Pune-based real estate professional and chairman of the India Institute of Real Estate (IIRE), a non-profit organization that seeks to promote the real estate business, set up Indiaproperties in 1999. Arguably the first real estate portal to be launched in India, Indiaproperties claims to be for individual buyers and sellers. “Around 82% of listings on our website are from individuals and the rest from builders and brokers,” says Malkani.
Real estate classified ads in newspapers cannot provide the scope of information that housing portals can, such as a virtual walk-through of the living space. “Portals are slowly but surely proving to be a substitute for classified ads,” says Varun Arya, a Gurgaon-based property consultant who placed an advertisement about his services on Magicbricks.com, a portal launched by Times Business Solutions. “It helps prospective buyers and sellers reduce the time spent on doing preliminary research.” He adds that after he inserted the advertisement, he has had a 25% increase in the number of queries he gets every day.