Indiaproperties.com, realtiesindia.com, dhan.com - these are amongthe places for hot, hot India-related propertyinformation. The realty market already has quite a few e-consultants, but the trendsetter was indiaproperties.com.

Ravina Malkani, director, indiaproperties.com, says that this is India's first interactive property listing service on the Internet and is designed to assist clients in the sale, purchase and leasing of properties anywhere in India, efficiently.

But Malkani stresses that indiaproperties.com is strictly a property listing service. ``It does not get involved in any way with the actual transactions betweenbuyers/sellers/brokers/renters. Our objective is to facilitate a quick matching of sellers to buyers or renters.''

But in the age of low connectivity, who are the target customers of a real estate site such as indiaproperties.com? Replies Malkani: ``Our target customer is any person, worldwide, who is interested in a property related transaction anywhere in India.'' Which means that a number of NRIs could be interested in either getting their Indian property listed on the site or buying something in India. And since connectivity in the US, UK and Gulf (where most NRIs reside) is pretty high, a site like this is bound to pick up.

Explaining the procedure, Malkani says that interested parties list their properties on the site. ``Via these listings, we bring together builders, brokers or property owners with prospective buyers, brokers and people who want to rent/lease property. Our site helps to do this in a very easy-to-use and cost-effective manner, by listing specific property criteria and needs (i.e.location, price, size, features, etc).'' Malkani says that people from all over the world, looking for property in India, have unlimited free access via the Internet to view all the properties listed here. ``We already have a substantially large number of listings, and it grows every day. We are proud to have the confidence of many large and highly respected builders, who have paid our nominal charges to have their properties listed on our site,'' she says.

Not only that, indiaproperties.com will soon offer a variety of property related information, which will provide value to other people and industries related to the property business, according to Malkani. ``Our first newsletter will be sent out in July itself,'' she says.

Though the site and the search engine have been online for a little over six months now, the venture itself started a year ago. Says Malkani: ``The directors, who started this venture, got together well over a year ago. Since then we have been working on the software development ofthe `search engine', which drives our site.''

Besides, indiaproperties.com has also been setting up offices across India, while working on other activities to help build up a team of talented people in a rapidly growing organisation. Now the focus is on continuous improvements and addition of new features.

The focus on improvement is only natural because it has competition in the market. How then is indiaproperties.com handling the competition, apart from pepping up its services? To answer that question, Malkani talks about the site's uniqueness: ``Indiaproperties.com is India's first real search engine for real estate, We do not just provide long lists of properties that do or do not properly meet a client's needs.'' She explains: ``The problem with other sites is that people have to wade through long lists, which give very few details to prospective clients and furthermore, the clients do not really know if a property is anywhere close to what they are really looking for.''

At indiaproperties.com,however, the prospective user can specify details of the property that he is looking for-city, sub-area of a city, area of property required, type of property (flat, bungalow, etc), price range, etc., she says. ``The indiaproperties.com search engine will select only those properties that meet the user's requirements. Also, a full page of details of each property can be seen on demand,'' she adds.

The page contains the location, address, area, price, contact details, a description in the owner's words, features such as building details, number of rooms, type of flooring, water source, garden, terrace, power source and back-up, cable TV, parking, etc.'' The other things that this site is banking on are value-added services such as free e-mail accounts for affiliate members, and hyperlinks to related sites. ``Real estate related information like housing finance, property laws, RBI regulations, market trends and research and much more will be regularly posted on our site and a newsletter will be sent onrequest,'' adds Malkani.

Net facts