The impact of the ‘new normal’ has led to growing synergies between technology and realty businesses and the year 2022 is all set to witness further disruptive innovations. Gopal Sarma, Senior Partner and Global Lead Emerging Markets, Real Estate and Construction, Bain & Company commenting on the increasing use of technology in all aspects of life said, “The digital systems are making the life a lot easier, especially for the digital savvy generation consumers who are looking for ease of doing business. And this has changed the way the real estate is now interacting with its customers. ”
Govind Rai, Co-Founder, Insomniacs concurred, “From the property transaction point of view, we are seeing the trend of developers outsourcing sales to the mandate
companies which helps in adding to the sales velocity. However, marketing attribution remains the biggest challenge followed by community management, workflow automation and virtual experience. Reaching out to the target audience or community, mapping the ROI and using the full capabilities of technology for workflow efficiency and best in class virtual experience are the areas of improvement.”
Abilash Haridass, CO-Founder & CEO, WeGot Utility Solutions Private Limited, added, “Indeed, customers now insist on value added services. There is also growing awareness of using technologies that can help them be more sustainable. For instance, we offer a sensor-based Internet of Things (IoT) device and a software platform for both residential and commercial establishments which helps to reduce the demand for water by more than 50 percent by tracking real time flow. It is being well received by the industry and the homeowners. Higher level of engagement through maintenance and a sense of community is what the customer is looking for which goes
beyond the point of sales to tech driven living experience.”
Aryaman Vir, Founder & CEO of Myre Capital agreed that real estate for long has been the domain for the rich and inaccessible to small investors along with property transactions being cloudy in nature. "Technology has transformed the way of investing in real estate. Now fractional ownership has made investing in commercial real estate easy and lucrative for retail investors and most importantly all the transactions happen on a tech
platform including site visits.” Pankaj Kapoor, Founder & MD, Liases Foras Real Estate Rating & Research Pvt Ltd shared that availability of correct data is one of the primary issue for realty firms as well as the technology providers. “The deficiency of data itself is an opportunity for most of the tech companies. This is where the AI and ML and many other things can help create a lot of data. Integrating the land records and creating a unified database like Adhaar will be a big step in that direction.”
Amit Agarwal, Founder and CEO, Nobroker.com pointed out the absence of formal regulatory framework in the sector. “The biggest advantage of technology in real estate has been transparency in transactions. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are further enhancing the communication by customizing the content for the best
suited information to the customer. In terms of aggregation of data, we are already working with the government and have streamlined data of property transactions available with the government and we can now give out exactly the pricing of properties in a particular area. This helps the customer to have on fingertips the property prices around his/her area of interest.”
Sudeep Aditya, Co-founder & Managing Partner, Oakbridge Asset Partners & Founder, Esswon Holdings stated, “According to me Proptech can be put into three buckets, one is the consumer focused technologies that are pretty advanced right now, second is the B2B related systems which are the greater focus for most companies for immediate value proposition and thirdly the financial services where I see more scope oftechnology in integrating financial services with real estate."
Gopal Sarma concluded, “The traditional way of doing things is going to change. In every element of the value chain of real estate whether it is in business development, land acquisitions, design, construction management, sales and marketing or community development, technology is at an infant stage, not only in India but world over. This offers a huge opportunity for tech systems to scale up going forward.”
