Real estate portals posing challenge to classified ads

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New Delhi, Aug 14: The internet is posing a serious challenge to the world of classified advertisements of newspapers. After job, matrimonial and social networking sites, it is real estate portals like Makaan.com, 99 acres.com, Magicbricks.com and indiaproperty.com that are stealing the thunder. Though the portals are reluctant to reveal their revenue figures, estimates suggest the total ad revenue of real estate portals hovers at Rs 100 crore.

While discussing the traffic on these portals, Aditya Verma, business head, Maakan.com, said, "Out of the 24 million people looking for homes in India, 2.8 million uses the online route." Talking about the kind of services provided by real estate portals, Vineet K Singh, business head, 99 acres.com added, "We list the properties for pre-launch, launch, buy, sale and resale."

Interestingly, the recent slump in the real estate sector has not reflected in the navigation of these online sites. While the number of hits from January to May this year for Makaan.com rose by 22%, during June and July it grew at 18%. Around 50% of the visitors evince interest in buying/renting properties online. However, the portals have no way of tracking how many of these actually convert into real buys.

Big developers, however, are more comfortable with print and out of home advertisements rather than online publicity. Kunal Banerjee, president, marketing, Ansal API, said, "We have a website which is pretty popular; so we have not used any of these portals."

Majority of the search is for homes, which is around 76%, compared to 24% for commercial space. The demand for home rentals is far less than the demand for buying new properties. Most of these portals are trying to lure traffic by making the sites more user friendly and providing lucrative packages to brokers and builders who want to be enlisted. For prospective buyers, however, there is no fee.

With internet penetration in India growing at 44% in the last couple of years, portal operators are confident that this business is on a growth mode.