The Internet is also home to regional housing websites, such as Teluguproperties.com, which service specific regions. “Nearly 80-90% of our clients on the website are end-users who are looking to buy or sell residential property and we have a 95% renewal rate,” says Deepali Singh, business head, 99acres.com, which has a database of 150,000 buyers.
Pramod Pereira, 35, assistant manager at Cargo Service Centre, a Mumbai-based freight handling company, who has been going through property portals to buy an apartment, says real estate portals make the home shopping process easier. “In a place such as Mumbai, where it’s difficult to find a single broker who covers far-flung areas, the property search portals help in shortlisting homes in preferred locations,” he says.
Before you bookmark these portals on your browser though, don’t assume that you will be able to do away with that greedy broker from the home buying/renting process completely.
Saurav Mukherjee, 31, regional manager with Interactive Television Pvt. Ltd, who recently relocated from New Delhi to Mumbai, checked out real estate portals hoping to come across an owner to cut down the expense of paying commission to a broker. He says he was disappointed to find a long list of brokers but very few individual sellers on the websites. He was ultimately forced to go through a broker to get to the apartment of his choice.
Being aware of the fact that brokers are an integral part of the real estate industry, promoters of the portals don’t intend to displace the middlemen. “Unfortunately, brokers have got a bad name,” says R. Sundar, president, Times Business Solutions, which manages Magicbricks.com. “Through property portals such as Magicbricks, we need to change that perception and bring about a higher level of professionalism in the industry. In the property buying process, the first basic need is to get information on available properties and shortlist them. Our site addresses this basic need for the individual. We help the customer generate leads.”
Property portals also have their flaws. There have been instances where these websites have displayed wrong contact numbers of advertisers, prices and incomplete or dated information about the property, which may no longer be available for sale.
J. Bharucha, 31, executive assistant of a family-run textile company in Mumbai, searched two portals but found no information about the neighbourhood where the homes were located. Neither could she access any photographs of the properties. Bharucha is looking for a home in a Parsi colony. “We can’t really remove the advertisement on behalf of the advertisers,” says Yash Asher, product manager at Indiaproperty.com, a vertical portal of the matrimonial website, Bharatmatrimony.com. “If the advertisers do not respond even after three reminders, we remove their listing from our website.”
Other portals put the onus of making content current on the visitors and advertisers. “Removing or updating the information on the website is the responsibility of the client (builders and agents),” says Sunder. “They are the ones who can edit the information on the site. With more than 600,000 properties on our site, buyers need to be informed consumers in such a complex and high-investment sector.”