Govind Rai- Co-Founder & CEO, Insomniacs setting the tenor of the discussion stated, “The human professional evolution has evolved from primarily agriculture to trading, moving on to industrialization and now to the age of digitization. Likewise in real estate we are seeing sales and marketing function moving from in-house teams to third party marketers and now to the mandate companies.”
Mohit Mishra- Head of Marketing – Office Business, DLF Limited said, “Marketing is never a thing where you can dispatch the gorilla team. You have to be on the ground and do it. We need a battalion not John Rambos.”
Rajat Jain- Head (NCR) - Sales & Marketing, Adani Realty expressed, “It depends on the kind of product you are selling, the ticket size, the volume you have to sell and the scale of the project. Large teams are equally important to having smaller channel partners and direct sales depending on the approach to reach out to customers. Having a mandate company has the benefit of having experts that understand the market very well and are committed to you. But, giving a mandate to a single company and leaving it totally to them, makes a developer totally dependent on one company. Therefore, hybrid model has worked well for companies.”
Dr Vishesh Rawat- Vice President & Head - Sales, Marketing, CRM & Leasing, M2K Group expressed that it all depends on the kind of developer and the project.” An established developer is conscious of maintaining its brand image and therefore a mandate company may work well that is aligned to its goals and ethos. For luxury projects, a mandate approach doesn’t work as the direct and exclusive connect with the HNI buyers works in this case. In case of a large projects, more than one mandate companies can be engaged for certain number of units and ticket sizes to each.”
Alok Gupta- Director- GraphisAds added, “From an agency’s perspective, in the last 20 years we have seen some interesting changes. Developers have started focusing on lifecycle value of the customer and not just a single sale. For niche projects, builders takes care of the sales and marketing themselves, for a commoditised project, it is outsourced to the channel partners or the mandate companies. We are seeing an influx of automation in real-estate to automate low-end and mid-level job s, utilizing skills at higher levels.”
WHAT DIGITAL MEANS
Govind Rai- Data that can give actionable insights to take the right actions, drive more conversions at the lowest cost possible is the crux of digital transition.
Dr. Vishesh Rawat- Almost every customer starts a real estate journey online. Mass-level communication as well as customisation is possible with digital technology.
Rajat Jain- I see another transition happening - providing information through metaverse, augmented reality, virtual reality and blockchain.
Mohit Misra- Digitisation helps give a matrix in terms of consumer behaviour yet, the pleasure of an on-ground experience cannot be replaced by an online site visit.
Alok Gupta- We are still in the infancy of Web3 so the next 10 years would be very different from the past 20 or 50 years, the way real estate had operated.
- In a true analogy, food delivery companies have better data than a restaurant similarly property portals have much better data than real-estate developers.
- We don’t have democratisation of data which might happen with Proptech coming in.
- Technology has helped us evaluate an offline response in an online mechanism.
- Data can now be captured real-time, increasing the efficiency and the engagement.
- The more transparent the industry is the more democratised it will become, such as fractional ownership.
The brokers have gradually become channel partners and now they are mandate companies so the respect for the community is growing. Moreover, digital has changed a few things for sure. The brokers of late have emerged as one of the largest buyers of inventories on the digital platform. They are using content more smartly than a lot of developers.
.jpg)
.jpg)
