The real estate business model is mainly dependent on the personal interaction between various stakeholders – sellers, agents, financial institutions. In this situation of COVID -19 pandemic, which has to prolonged lock down, has made customer movement to project sites, this led to delaying home buying. But, this will not hold true for the Indian real estate sector where the convenience of buying and selling a home online is not yet implemented. Indian Real estate is also expected to achieve $1 trillion by the year 2030 and become the third-largest all over the world. With this current pandemic, PropTech adoption has already been started to trigger in the Indian real estate. It can give the chance of customer-centric convenient platforms for customers to get interacted and engaged with real estate projects and give real-time insights to developers, who can then present tailor-made offerings.
The most important barrier is a one-of-a-kind event in human life. The developers’ staff has been started to do work from home. Hence, good steps have to be adopted to engage customers in going forward. Consumers have already accepted buying what they want online, with ease of market place giving customers the freedom to choose through multiple options and developed with a secure payment gateway. This has created a number of unicorns in the Indian ecosystem.
The customer has to go through the extensive paperwork and processes between multiple stakeholders spread across housing finance companies and developers while buying, selling, or renting property leading to unnecessary extended transaction time and cost.
Even before this period of lockdown, the Indian real estate was under a lot of stress. Project finance servicing cost, extended transaction, continuous depletion of margins, increased cost of acquiring a customer, and continuous depletion of margins timeline were some of the biggest pain points faced by the developer community currently faces.
There is a lot of potential in Indian real estate. Indian real estate is the second-largest employer in India and contributed about 8 percent to India’s GDP in the year 2017 and is expected to produce about 13 percent to India’s gross domestic product (GDP) by 2025, according to a report by National Real Estate Development Council (NAREDCO) and Asia Pacific Real Estate Association (APREA).
To reach such astonishing numbers and meet the demands of ever-changing dynamics of businesses and continuous evolution of customer behavior, PropTech is a very useful and effective way. It paves the way for the customer to interact and engage with real estate project through a customer-centric convenient platform and give real-time insights to developers, who can then present tailor-made offerings.
