THE DISCUSSION HIGHLIGHTED HOW TECHNOLOGY-FOCUSED START-UPS ARE DRIVING REAL ESTATE AND THE NEW VISION OF NEXT GENERATION OF REAL ESTATE ENTREPRENEURS FOR THE SECTOR.
Dr Adil Malia, CEO & Partner, The Firm setting the context of the discussion stated, “The world is getting redefined by disruptive technologies at an unmatchable pace. In sync, the logical movement of smart players within the trade has been on converting these new technologies into customer experience leading to sharper business focus and yielding better results.”
According to Arihant Parakh, Director, Orbit Group, the biggest changes needed are, to move out of the traditional way of doing businesses and willingness to adapt to the changing scenarios. “Real-estate industry is now multi-generations working together. In terms of metaverse, in India we are still at a very nascent stage, but at the right time to recognize this paradigm shift and to move towards it.”
Avinash Suresh, COO, Arvind Smartspaces agreed, “Necessity has forced us into adoption of technology. One of the stark examples is Covid -19. Companies invested in digital sales technology and today across the board digital sales accounts for 35-40% for most developers. Today we are using augmented realty to see what designs will look like. We are going to see progressive developers adopt new technologies sooner than later.”
John K Kuruvilla, Chief Mentor, Brigade REAP elaborated, “In 2016 the investment of real-estate in tech was mere 0.9%. In the last 6 years it has gone to 1.5%, that too because of the younger generation who are well-versed with technologies. However, metaverse could be a fad i.e. technology that does not deliver a tangible outcome from today’s perspective like saving expenditure, reducing costs of customer acquisition or improving customer efficiency etc.”
Parth Mehta, CMD, Paradigm Realty added, “We are spending more on the website, SEO activity, social media & lead generation activities and video chats that have increased efficiency. In construction we are adopting technologies to reduce margin of error.”
Sujay Kalele, Founder & MD, Tru Realty shared, “What we have seen in the Proptech space is may be version 1.0 of the tech disruption. We have seen specific points getting disrupted in the last 5 years. E.g. Property discovery for property search and AR and VR for property visualization. The entire value chain from land acquisition to the entire execution cycle which includes construction, sales, and post-sales, pre-sales is something not being looked at by tech companies.”
CHALLENGES & ADOPTION OF PROPTECH
Arihant Parakh said, “We have to look at the benefits tech gets to the project and what is the eventual outcome on the company's profitability and viability. For instance, rather than going on a metaverse, organizations are using holographic visual tours of model flats in marketing offices. Even experiential tours of the projects would be more cost effective when compared to having a metaverse.”
Avinash Suresh added, “Today we have a complete team working only around sales technology and some of the things may not pay off in the short term but will have long lasting implications in learnings for us, as real-estate is a long purchase cycle.”
John K Kuruvilla stated, “We have broken down Propetech technologies to design stage, construction stage, operational, marketing and handover. Today we have at least 10 start-ups in each of these verticals adding value in saving time, reducing cost, and improving margins. Covid was a great wake up call for the industry and a boon for Proptech. 48% of start-ups raised money during Covid.”
Parth Mehta believes that the consumer preferences have changed so fast that if you make a wrong product, it will fail and add extra cost burden. “The technological solutions today help study the market and in decision making.”
Sujay Kalele added that beyond technology, in real-estate people to people contact plays a vital role.
As per John K Kuruvilla real estate is one of the last bastions where data based decision making did not take place in earlier generations. Now, the younger generation is using it sharply.
Dr Adil Malia concluded, “The new technologies are indeed changing the customer engagement and experience. Soon we will see avatars of the customer in the metaverse staying in a building and experiencing what the day would look like before buying.”
THE RESPONSE OF THE PEOPLE TO DISRUPTION IS EITHER RIGID OR AGILE. RIGID EXPERIENCES TEND TO TUMBLE BY THE WAYSIDE BUT AGILITY CONVERTS DISRUPTIVE INTO EXPERIENCE WHICH ENHANCES THE BUSINESS RESULTS.
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