It’s been quite a time when housing.com is named for real state purposes. Well the website is a Mumbai-based real estate search portal and it allows customers to search for housing based on geography, number of rooms, and various other filters. Even the company is able to have 6,000 brokers in a short span of time and serves 25 cities in India including the major ones namely Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata and Delhi.
If you have been looking for a place for some rental purpose and honestly speaking if your requirement ranges from a good house to approach ability of the place to whether there should be departmental stores nearby or not. In many cases, you often waste a lot of time by visiting flats which you could have straightway rejected, if you had more details prior to the visit.
There are so many online real estate which search just the property alone, but the Mumbai based company, housing.com has launched an awesome map based product which is able to actually map out the details of the property. This is not just decoding the property, but it is about everything else you’d like to know about the property such as who has given the post a property for sale and who have right from pictures to rental, security deposit, details if furnished etc.
The way this site works is very simple. You can simply start your search and then refine it by using multiple filters. Once you are done with it, you can call up the broker or fill up the form and they will soon call you back.
There are several other sites which try to hide the fact of the middlemen that is the broker. But housing.com is very clear in their path as they let you know that brokers has an important role to play in the entire food chain and real value for a customer should be around information.
Considering the monetization model, the site takes a start-up charge as subscription fee (bi-annual and annual) to brokers and they allow them to upload unlimited listings on their website. The listings that are done for landlords are free for now but the start-up may start charging a nominal amount later.
They track total number of hits and queries for each flat and their metric is number of leads generated per listed home and not conversion because the latter depends upon knowledge, expertise, responsiveness and negotiation skills of the broker in question.
If you are thinking that this website is for bigger real estate, and then it is not, the bigger real estate websites leave the data to be uploaded by the brokers who frequently spam the website with fake listings in order to increase the visibility of the website. In accurate words, the bigger websites serve no more than a telephone directory to search for broker contacts. By investing with that site, you have the surety that, they will showcase only the genuine flats with verified details and pictures.
In short, if you just want to find a broker, then its better that you go for bigger real estate websites but if your preference is on finding a flat rather than a broker, then housing.com will give you a huge option of flats with verified pictures and details to choose from. Also, the bigger websites can never decode each and every flat accurately. Housing.com provides additional information such as neighborhood and commute details for every flat on your website. They’re big on data and technology and they believe good and genuine data separates good real estate from a bad one. For them, data mapping is not a different ballgame and it’s just an extension of the benefits of accurate data collection.
Their approach to post a property for sale is quite an interesting one to build this business and if you are based in Mumbai, do give Housing.com a chance. Even websites like wikihow, Business Insider, and others are showcasing their work and are quite satisfied with it. Now, given the offline nature of this business, it will be interesting to see how housing.com grabs mind share from the bigger real estate sites. Will they be able to surpass all with their new thoughts and ways. It would be very interesting to know.