Well, sometime home is a person,? writes author Beth Revis in A Million Suns, the second book in her Across the Universe trilogy. True, home is a person. But it is also a hope and an assurance of a better future. It is a place where you look forward to after a long day at work. From socialising with friends over dinner to just sleeping off the fatigue in your bed, your home is your heaven.
But finding that heaven is not easy. From never-ending leg work to slimy brokers, many people face myriad problems while house-hunting. A Delhi-based journalist puts it this way, ?Finding Fanny in the movie was easier. Looking for a decent home to live in is a far cry, especially in big cities. Brokers show you pigeon holes in the name of flats. I remember one broker showing me a house once where the kitchen was a makeshift 5 ft x 3 ft set-up in the balcony. Another time, when a deal was finalised, the tenants decided against leaving the house and the brokers never returned the brokerage fee to me.?
These are not one-off incidents. Although the journalist decided to move on, some enterprising people stuck to it to solve the problem.
That conviction gave birth to Mumbai-based Prateek Shukla?s Grabhouse.com. The portal, of which Shukla is a co-founder, calls itself the only ?completely broker-free home search engine?. ?Our USP is broker-free house renting. We are the only company to offer a 100% broker-free structure that ensures our customers? needs are taken care of. We offer personalised service to all users as per their needs. With no involvement of middlemen, there is more transparency and accuracy of data,? says Pankhuri Srivastava, co-founder and CMO, Grabhouse, which started operations in July 2013 and currently offers its services in four cities: Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore and Hyderabad. In the 14 months since it started, it has helped 17,000 people find homes.
When a person starts house-hunting, especially in a big city, brokers are his best friends. Most of the properties are bought, sold and leased through brokers, who charge both the owner and the prospective tenant or buyer. The brokerage can vary from 15 days? to two months? rent (in case of rentals) and in the range of 1-2% of the value of the property (in case of a sale). So getting a broker-free service provider that costs less than R1,000 and offers personalised services to fulfill one?s needs is more than anybody can ask for. ?We offer one to two free options to everyone, but if you are looking for unlimited options, we have our premium service. It costs R999 for people with a budget of over R8,000 and R499 for users with a budget of less than R8,000,? says Srivastava.
And a broker-free service is not the only attraction. Some portals like Roofontop.com and Commonfloor.com collate the crime data of localities that
they serve in and also provide virtual tours of houses
so that a client doesn?t have
to waste his time in making the rounds of all possible options. Another unique feature provided by Grabhouse is a compatibility test for finding a roommate. ?We introduced the compatibility test to make sure that our users find compatible roommates and flatmates. For this, we take into consideration things like eating and drinking habits, whether the person smokes, etc, and give a compatibility score. This feature is free of cost,? says Srivastava of Grabhouse.
Grabhouse, however, is not the only home search engine that understands the importance of being broker-free. At Housing.com, another new-age home search engine that serves in 24 cities, there are around 80,000 active listings directly from landlords, says Advitiya Sharma, its co-founder and marketing head. Also, it serves its clients for free. However, it also has listings by brokers and if a user chooses a house listed by a broker on the website, he will have to pay brokerage. India?s first map-based portal, as per Sharma, Housing.com lists essential facilities such as nearby hospitals, schools, railway stations, bus stops, etc, around the properties. It also provides users relevant data such as a particular area?s lifestyle index and price heat index (which localities are expensive, which are cheap), etc.
Commonfloor.com, which started operations in 2007, specialises in giving its users a virtual tour of the property. Like Housing.com, Commonfloor doesn?t charge its users. ?Property seekers can see a 3D model/virtual view of any given flat or housing unit,? says co-founder and CEO Sumit Jain, adding that the primary objective of this feature is to provide property seekers with a 360-degree view of a house. ?The feature helps users get a good feel of the property in terms of space, lighting and ambience.? Commonfloor also allows users to get an aerial view of the property and its surrounding area without having to visit the location in person through its ?Sky View? feature. The portal uses phantom drones to click images of a property and its immediate vicinity. These images are then woven together to provide users with a 360-degree view of the location. ?These drones are set at a height of about 180 m, keeping in mind the top floor of the under-construction building,? says Jain, who got his engineering degree in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, in 2006 and worked for a short duration at Oracle before co-founding Commonfloor.com.
With more than 2,00,000 users visiting the portal every day, Commonfloor.com has witnessed a 100% increase in traffic, a 125% jump in live listings and has added over 25,000 communities in the past two quarters. The website also gets more than 25% traffic on its site via mobile apps.
Mumbai-based Gautam Chaturvedi, who works in the food retail industry, got to know about Grabhouse via Facebook. ?I checked other websites such as Magicbricks.com and 99acres.com, but these were full of brokers and had vague information, not to forget the spam that they added to my mailbox. Grabhouse, on the other hand, is free of brokers and provides specific and relevant details of the property,? says 27-year-old Chaturvedi, who found a house with the help of Grabhouse earlier this year. He had to pay R499 to avail himself of Grabhouse?s services.
Explains Srivastava of Grabhouse: ?The properties come to us directly from owners. Once a seeker comes and mentions his requirements on the website, we find relevant houses and connect seekers to appropriate owners. We make sure that neither the lister nor the seeker is a broker. If we come across brokers, we immediately block them.?
With the advent of technology, the number of people searching for homes online has increased manifold in the past couple of years. Almost everybody today searches for a home online before going to a professional for help. ?Around 75% of people now begin their home search online,? says Sharma of Housing.com. ?The current generation of home seekers is more aware and, therefore, prefers to do research about a property before approaching a broker or landlord.?
The market has no wonder become cut-throat with these portals having to constantly innovate in order to get more customers. ?The biggest challenge,? says Sharma, ?was to break the trend and change the direction of the online real estate industry. When you decide to add value to the industry by innovating something out of the box, people usually call you crazy. That was our biggest barrier.?
But now, it seems, that barrier is on its way out.