Rahul and Seema Chatterjee recently shifted to their sprawling apartment located on the famed Golf Course Road in Gurugram. Both young software professionals, the Chatterjees’ bought their new abode in February through Square Yards, a real estate brokerage company, trying to metamorphose the real estate industry through its digital real estate platform, making home buying and selling a delightful and one-of-its-kind affair.
Across town, Varun Desai, a retired PWD engineer is overseeing new movers in his two-bedroom apartment. The day before he had closed on the sale of his house to Square Yards and would be moving to Mumbai next day where he had bought a sea-facing flat to enjoy his sunset years. Varun is happy with the sale as it took just a few clicks and a digital approval by a broker to close the sale.
The Chatterjees and the Desai are the consumer faces of disruption that is churning the residential real estate industry. With emerging technologies rejigging the foundations of real estate and lending a breath of fresh air to the home buying and selling experience, consumers like the Chatterjees and the Desai, high on digital content, are providing a glimpse of what the future real estate market has in store.
The real estate sector still hasn’t shed its crumbling, age-old skin. Homebuyers in the 21st century have to wade through a barrage of problems that the real estate industry is saddled with. A widespread real estate data asymmetry, lack of credible information about real estate products, numerous property visits by the homebuyer to assess the status of the property; all these clamours takes the wind out of a home buyer’s confidence to buy a property.
The aversion of the real estate sector for long towards the digital revolution has dented its image. Living in the age of the internet where hailing a cab, ordering a dinner or trading stocks have boiled down to a few clicks on a smartphone, the physical nature of business of the Real Estate Sector is frowned upon by tech-savvy home buyers.
Running their business with a conventional mindset for decades without any slack, real estate developers didn’t feel the need for change, turning a blind eye to the burgeoning demand for data-fied real estate.
Homebuyers felt starved of a good home buying experience akin to that of online retail shopping. For 21st century consumers, Buying Property Online is more than just an investment. Hard-pressed for time in a fast-paced world, home buyers yearned for a state-of-the-art digital experience while buying a home.
Thankfully, with the proptech revolution penetrating real estate nuclei, online real estate platforms like Square Yards have come up to the fore, aimed at fine-tuning the real estate strata and lend a comfortable, homebuying experience.
Sitting on millions of real estate data points and enabling data learning exercises, these professional real estate solutions are clearing the real estate fog, bringing transparency, accountability and a never-before-heard of shopping for real estate. With the aid of analytics and data sciences, fake listings are weeded out and homebuyers’ exact needs are addressed upon instantly.
With the present lockdown toeing the line that innovation is the key to survival, Online Real Estate Portals have now invested in 3D walkthroughs, virtual reality tours and 360-degree views to make home-buying an immersive celluloid-like experience; allowing home seekers to look at properties from the convenience of their couch.
The good news is the real estate sector has awoken to a new reality, that digital is the future. This potential of digital space and the wonders it can bring to the real estate fraternity will result in a tectonic shift in the brick-and-mortar sector, a transition which will make it an unstoppable force.
