Realty making a shift to the virtual world

The sector is seeing a gradual decline of actual property exhibitions, as more and more companies move to the online platform, notes Magicbricks CEO

Magicbricks, a leading property portal from the Times of India group, last month organised an online property festival, evoking a huge response from developers, intermediaries and consumers.

"We have now switched over to a pure online model for exhibitions. We find a lot of traction from the offline medium to the digital," says Sudhir Pai, CEO, Times Business Solutions, which is part of Times Internet Ltd. Pai sees a gradual decline of actual property exhibitions, as the entire strategy shifts online.
Magicbricks joined hands with GroupM and Google to host the Great Online Home Festival between July 18 to 27. The festival exhibited property stock worth Rs30 billion. About 120 property developers and several home décor firms and housing finance companies participated in the festival.
Many of the developers offered attractive deals to buyers. "We also had a lot of rich content on the platform and there were hangouts with developers and experts," says Pai. The emergence of the whole segment of buying property online is in concurrence with fast changing consumer behaviour, he notes. Consumers are using portals today not just for listings, but also using it increasingly for deciding on what to buy and at what price.
Consumers today want simplification of the entire process of property purchase, especially with the anvil of the latest mobile technologies, he adds.
Traffic on the Magicbricks website has scaled significantly in recent years. The site attracts about 10 million visits a month, with 18 per cent of the visitors being NRIs, mainly from the US, Canada and the Gulf. "Consumers are using our website for research and making decisions," says Pai.
E Jayashree Kurup, Head, Content and Research, Magicbricks, points out that the website has a platform where experts, including legal, taxation and financial, advice potential customers. This is very popular among the visitors. "People want to know whether they are buying at the right price, whether the locality is right, and a whole host of other queries," she says. "If you handhold the customer through the biggest decision they take, they will trust you."
The advice section on the site is interactive and intuitive. It provides comparative figures for different projects and locations, and also has several calculators on EMIs, rentals, prices, etc.
Magicbricks also aggregates property related news from the Times of India and Economic Times, two widely read newspapers in India, to provide data and property analytics and guides on how to buy a house. There are three categories of visitors: landlords looking for tenants or wanting to sell their properties, brokers, and builders. Magicbricks has become a marketplace for all of them, and potential buyers.
Pai says the site is primarily a matchmaking place and the actual fulfilment happens offline. "Online transactions are small, as these are high-ticket items," he notes. "I don't think the markets are ready for online transactions. People identify properties and do research online, but the actual transactions take place offline."
This is the case with property portals in most parts of the world, he says. Even in the US, about 85 per cent of the process takes place online, but the final fulfilment is offline. "The only exception is Australia, where transactions do happen online," adds Pai.
Magicbricks does not charge consumers for the service. Instead, the brokers and developers pay for the listings and advertisements.
Research done by the site and Google reveals that 70 per cent of the available inventory of homes in India has moved online. And 60 per cent of consumers who buy homes also use online services at some stage before making the final decision. Magicbricks has nearly a million listings of properties.
A few years ago, most of the listings related to properties in the top six cities and the rest of the locations were described as 'emerging markets.' But now property listings relate to nearly three dozen cities, where Magicbricks has offices, and even tier-II and tier-III cities feature in the listings.
According to Kurup, consumers from the smaller cities are serious users of the site. "They take advice from our experts seriously," she says. "Many of them are first-time buyers of property and it is a totally different experience for them."
Indian consumers are now not reluctant to trade properties. "About a decade ago, an average Indian would have just one property in a lifetime," says Kurup. "But now, many Indians own two or three properties. Many also sell existing properties and upgrade to better homes."

• India