Category: Real Estate Sales

The advancements made in the field of science and technology has transformed the working systems of every segment. The industry which used to run on paper and human connections is on the verge of complete digital Transformation. Technology in this regard is changing the real estate industry for the greater good. Under technology, Blockchain possesses the abilty to bring transparency and change the industry like no other technology could. In this blog, we will go through the dynamics of Blockchain that are in the play, and how it has touched almost every sector across the globe, including the real estate sector.

 

Blockchain Technology and Its Relevance to Real Estate

Blockchain technology refers to a peer-to-peer network that handles decentralized ledgers of myriad transactions. It is, to quite an extent, influenced by cryptocurrency, which has taken over the finance segment lately, thereby making it quite likely for liquid money to lose its importance as a medium of exchange over the years to come. 

The  real estate sales, governed by the property value chain, may soon be taken over by blockchain. This projection indicates that soon blockchain may be used to purchase real estate through crypto-currencies and tokenization.

Another crucial role where blockchain comes in real estate technology is tokenization, and with it comes the possibility to trade for properties just like crypto-currencies are traded. 

Even though the complete adoption of blockchain in real estate may take a decade from now, the groundwork has already begun. Once the pieces fall into place, there would be a complete overhaul of the industry which would benefit every individual involved in it, directly or indirectly. 

Unveiling Blockchain Dynamics in the Real Estate Industry

However, to reap full-fledged benefits in real estate, blockchain technology requires understanding its dynamics thoroughly and deeply. Let us understand them in detail and highlight the advantages they would bring to the Indian real estate market. 

1. Boosts Operational Efficiencies

Blockchain in real estate has offered a new means of establishing a connection between buyers and sellers. It has cut intermediaries, which has helped cut down costs for the real estate industry. 

It has further securely facilitated data sharing, streamlining rental collections and payments to property owners, and even eased premium due diligence across the portfolio. With complete transparency, everyone in the chain gets complete information and is fully aware of the developments taking place at any given point of time. This way, it has become easy for investors and realtors to get valuable insights anytime, anywhere. 

Also, safe and faster data transfer has solved the issue of non-transparency and slowed operations. Fractional ownership has attracted investments and even granted access to the secondary markets. 

2. Solving The Challenge of Transactions

Blockchain in real estate has made transactions secure and fraud-free. With real estate blockchain, property transactions do not have to go through third parties as there is nothing underhanded. 

You can now streamline payments and get proof of parties possessing enough funds needed to close the transactions in both rental and purchase scenarios. This way, the challenges of transactions in real estate can be secured and transparent for both buyers and sellers of the same. 

3. Smart Contracts and Agreements

Smart contracts in real estate help in automating the agreement process and eliminating the involvement of intermediaries. It simplifies business operations and has even scaled down the traditional methods of executing a transaction, keeping the authenticity and credibility intact. 

Virtual currencies cooperate on the same technology and further help transform paper-driven and offline commercial real estate transactions like sales, financing, leases, etc., into the digital mode. 

These contracts run on the blockchain as computer code. They are stored on a public database that cannot be altered or changed, thereby maintaining the safety and security of the deals between parties and even increasing their transparency. Also, the chances of fraud are reduced to a bare minimum.

Also, with blockchain technology spreading its wings over the real estate sector, smart contracts or electronic contracts may become popular. These contracts perform defined actions automatically by using computer protocols and monitoring stored clauses. 

4. Tokenization

Real estate does not seem a very reliable liquid asset to most people as it takes a lot of time to conclude a sale transaction. 

But, with tokenization and crypto-currencies in this segment, executing transactions will become easier and quicker. Properties can now be bought and sold like stock on exchanges with cryptocurrencies, lowering crowd-funding barriers. It has made the sector more advanced and innovative with the introduction of tokenization through cryptocurrencies. It has improved the liquidity and security of transactions through smart contracts and agreements, paving the way for excellent prospects in the years to come. 

Now, sellers do not have to wait for a financially stable buyer to come their way. Instead, sellers who understand the value can readily trade in real estate properties, even in fraction ownership. This way, tokens’ liquidity may increase, and real estate may soon be turned into a leading revenue-generating sector. 

5. Regulatory Mechanism

Real estate and property management involve complex regulations that must be followed diligently and adhered to on time. Blockchain in real estate helps in regulating and improving private regulatory compliance by streamlining the process of buying and selling properties and even making it more secure. This way, buyers can easily trace the history and ownership of a property. Sellers can get better transparency around the sale process. This is made possible because blockchain lends itself to improving compliance processes by helping compliance officers keep track of all the complex regulations required therein. 

Final Take

Real estate blockchain development trends have increased over the last decade. This technology has brought innovative measures that lay the foundation for a bigger and better good for the real estate industry in the future. 

Hence, in a nutshell, blockchain is here to change the industry for the greater good, and this universal system of buying and selling on a global platform is only going to put the real estate industry in the mainstream on the global economic map. 

BeyondWalls, a tech-driven online platform providing collaboration between Real Estate developers and channel partners in the industry, excels in providing an  integrated proptech ecosystem where property buyers and sellers can have a seamless journey through endless offerings that benefit both parties in a fair deal. With considerable experience in real estate, the company aims to project the real estate ecosystem in India as the market leader on the global network.

The real estate industry is highly competitive. With the ever-growing competition, technology-centric development, customers’ demand, and regulations & rules, it can get challenging to market & sell real estate properties. However, among all, getting potential prospects as leads and turning them into paying customers is the biggest challenge affecting the ROI directly.

CRM software company Hubspot estimates that around 61% of marketers have reported real estate lead generation as their biggest real estate challenge. The hurdles come in the form of capturing leads, segmenting who is the right fit, who is motivated to make a purchase, and who is ready to buy or engage with the service. While all these leads can be captured online, the real task is converting them into qualified ones.

Keeping all these challenges in mind, we have come up with the top 10 real estate lead generation strategies that will help businesses to engage the maximum number of prospects and convert them into paying customers.

Understanding Goals, Platform & Content

You must set realistic goals for your business before you market your properties in front of thousands of people. These goals must be achievable and must be formed according to the SMART principle — Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. A simple example of setting a realistic goal would be deciding on the number of real estate leads over the course of a particular time.

Once you have drilled down your goals, you then come down to choosing a real estate marketing platform that works best for you. While Facebook and Google ads will serve your marketing aspects better, there are other platforms that you can choose as per your needs & requirements. LinkedIn, Taboola, Google Banners, and YouTube, amongst others, are examples of great platforms that can be utilized to a greater extent.

After you are done with planning, you can focus on the content that you are going to deliver in order to improve real estate sale. Your marketing content must be precise, grab the users’ attention, and give them something no competitor provides. Some aspects you need to factor in are; writing catchy headlines, presenting relevant information, and including actionable CTAs.

Setting Up an Effective Ad Campaign

In real estate marketing, with the right campaign, you will inform customers of your product or offerings. Your campaign must be set in a way that captures prospects’ attention and entices them to use your product or service. Irrespective of your platform and marketing channel, your communication must be clear and consistently in line with your products’ designed goals.

Here are some of the pointers that will help you set up a good campaign:

• Display your USPs
• Give them offers
• Offer benefits over advantages
• Taking aspiration, emotional angle
• Powerful CTAs
• Create Urgency
• Build word of mouth

There is a multitude of factors that can help you set up a good campaign. The above-mentioned would be adequate for starting out.

Having an Impactful Website

A website is an effective place for real estate developers to showcase their properties. A visual-driven landing page with clear communication can generate a lot of leads for a real estate business.

While visual-driven graphics and compelling copy will surely help, you can increase your chances of getting leads by using lead magnets through live chat or offering a valuable gift in exchange for an email or a phone number. These magnets can be downloading floor plans, getting exclusive offers, and asking for email IDs through chatbots before answering any questions.

Further, your website can be extended to having testimonials, blogs, media links, and social media links to increase lead generation chances.

Utilizing Social Media to Increase Real Estate Sales

Social media grants real estate businesses the power to dive into the minds of customers and deliver the very information they want. However, its selection will depend on the initial stages of deciding on the platform. Businesses can use social media to:

• Create catchy, visual-driven images on Instagram
• Attract traffic from LinkedIn
• Create a custom audience on Facebook
• Micro-blog updates on Twitter

Another significant advantage social media offers is the understanding the customer sentiment to learn more about their preferences. Customers can be engaged quickly and easily with every question or query answered.

Making Informed Decisions with Powerful Analytics

Your complete control over data metrics & analytics will open doors to understanding customer sentiment and optimising your real estate marketing campaign as you proceed with your objectives.

With website analytics, you get to learn a lot of information about which users are visiting, how much time they spend on your landing page, which section they interact with the most, and whether they are clicking on the CTA. The same extends to your ad campaign, real estate sales, email marketing, and how your ads are performing. With detailed information, you will learn, evaluate, track, and optimize your content to increase the chances of people enquiring.

Nurturing Customer Effectively

Nurturing is important as it can directly make up the mind of the customers to make a deal. With the right set of drip emails, you build trust with your customers and let them know you care about them and are not just there to complete transactions.

The following are some ways to lead to effective real estate lead generation.

• Leverage targeted content
• Use multi-channel techniques
• Focus on multiple touches
• Timely follow up
• Send tailored content
• Prioritise using lead scoring
• Align sales and marketing strategies

Using Word of Mouth Marketing

This refers to a free kind of marketing where a customer refers your product or service to his friends, family, and others and convinces them to engage in the same service. As per stats, this is one of the powerful forms of advertising as more than 90% of people trust recommendations over any marketed content.

Word of Mouth marketing is a direct result of:

• Delivering exceptional service
• Giving exclusive services
• Providing good after-sales service
• Offerings gifts & rewards

Real estate businesses can encourage WOW marketing with a host of special offers & discounts on referrals and providing good post-sales services.

In Conclusion

As stats point out, real estate lead generation comes off as a significant challenge when marketing and making real estate sales. However, with the help of technology and a detailed plan, the hurdles can be overcome easily. Real estate businesses can use the above-mentioned strategies to generate qualified leads and turn them into paying customers.

At the same time, real estate businesses can take the help of a full-fledged PropTech Ecosystem such as BeyondWalls to generate leads without much effort.

The Indian economy has proved resilient time and time again. Even the pandemic, which was one of the worst disasters in human history, could not completely derail it. However, the recovery has been slower than many expected. And now that we are inching towards the pre-pandemic levels of economic stability, the Russia-Ukraine war has emerged as a major roadblock. The price of most raw materials has shot up, leaving developers with no choice but to pass on the hike to their consumers.

This coupled with the recent slew of repo rate hikes by the RBI will lead to a dip in home buyers’ appetite. Given that real estate is the second-largest employment generator in India and is expected to contribute 13% to India’s GDP by 2025, we might be heading to a mild recession in the next 6-8 months.

There are more than 4,80,000 unsold units in the top 7 Indian cities as per RERA and IGR data. Pune contributes more than 9% to this number with 45,000+ unsold units, which, at the present rate, will take another 2 years to sell. And yet, we see new projects being launched regularly.

Developers looking to overcome this situation in Pune must strive to understand the changing customer preferences and tailor their offerings to meet demand. Today, while developers are offering marquee properties at a premium, the consumer has become fiscally conservative and is unwilling to spend as much.

BeyondWalls latest market research in Pune corroborated this fact and unveiled some startling insights:

• Right now, price is the sole decision-making factor behind a purchase.
• Homebuyers are extremely concerned about the lending rates, economic conditions, and construction risks, and are willing to delay their purchase till they get the right deal.
• Even in the present situation, the demand for affordable and mid-segment properties remains steady. 2BHKs in the range of INR 50-60 Lakhs are highly sought after.
• Just 10% of buyers are willing to spend at a premium and even they have fixed budgets and are in no hurry to purchase.
• Mid-segment is the only inventory that will continue to sell even as the rest of the segments remain stagnant over the next 6-8 months (The only exceptions to this will be projects placed at a premium location and with a significant competitive advantage.)
• Customers in the current buying cycle are more inclined towards properties that are ready or nearing possession. They will only choose a new launch if its price benefits them.

These insights make clear the need for the right pricing strategy and that any wrong move will hurt the sale of projects. To avoid real estate sales stagnation, here’s what developers must consider when planning a new project:

• Market demand
• Product-market fit
• Sale velocity of the micro-market in the product segment
• Target buyer’s financial conditions, based on predictive research
• Communication strategy that markets the product to the target audience

Even with all of this as a guiding principle, developers need to leverage data in their decision-making process. They must make informed decisions that are backed by critical metrics and actionable insights. The first step is analyzing the wealth of data that has been accumulated as a result of their digital transformation initiatives. This would help them understand their target customers, sell their inventory, and ride out the next economic slump with relative ease.

Sources:

• Primary market research
• Data from RERA and CREMatrix
• Business Standard (some information but not data)
• IBEF

The Indian real estate industry is the backbone of the country’s economy. This sector has seen its highest upswings and downswings in the last two years, mainly due to the events unfolding after the COVID-19 pandemic. Post the second wave subsiding, the real estate sector has remained largely resilient and has shown signs of revival. As India positions itself as the driver of the global economy and promises high-speed growth across industries, commercial real estate, increasing housing demand, and focus on metro real estate will be the key drivers of growth.

The Indian real estate sector is not just crucial due to our growing real estate demand for office space, housing, and accommodation. Still, it is also an essential growth driver for India’s economy. As per  IBEF reports, the real estate sector is the second-highest employment generator in India and is expected to reach US$ 1 trillion in market size by 2030, up from US$ 200 billion in 2021. It is also expected to contribute 13% to its GDP by 2025.

To help cater to this growing demand, the  real estate broker network needs to stay abreast with the latest real estate trends while adopting technology as an enabler to help them reach a wider audience. With post-pandemic driven changes to real estate buying and the growing attention of NRIs and foreign investors, real estate sales processes are changing significantly. Here is a look at the key trends and preferences that will drive real-estate demand in metro cities: 

1. Advancement in Technology

Demand comes soaring in real estate and that too with stiff competition. As customers require personalized and specific recommendations, the real estate broker network needs to increasingly adopt predictive analytics and technology to accurately forecast demand, understand customer preferences, and simplify placing orders with the vendor.  Developers are also keen to use technology to gauge the demand from the users and use it to plan their sales strategies and future projects.
Technology is also being leveraged for internal real estate process management, such as

• Understanding future demands
• Inventory management, and
• Raw material procurement

As time goes by,  real estate sales are increasingly becoming technology & data-driven and will become crucial for real estate developers and service providers. 

2. Preference Towards Mid & Premium Segment

Since the pandemic, people are spending more time at home, with remote work also being considered by several large organizations. It has changed customer preference, and homebuyers prefer mid to:

• Premium segment homes
• Housing societies
• Plush apartments
• Gated communities

This growing trend is mainly seen in metro cities and in smaller cities where the younger population is growing and looking for an independent home. 

3. Importance of Leisure, Personal Space, and Flexibility

In addition to a premium apartment, home buyers are also considering amenities provided when it comes to buying or investing in real estate. The buyers are considering new amenities as per:

• More extensive flats or apartments
• Space for specifically designed home offices
• Additional space that includes a terrace or more oversized balcony

Homebuyers also tend to prefer societies with shared co-working spaces, meeting rooms, creche, and other facilities that can help them effectively manage their work-from-home lifestyle.

4. Preference for Low-Density Projects

While COVID-19-led trends have created a shift in how close or segregated most home buyers want to stay, the cost factor also plays a crucial role in homeowners preferring to buy in a high-rise or low-density apartment complex, given that it is a relatively more affordable option.

The growing preference for low-density housing projects also has to do with changing priorities. The daily home-to-office commute is no longer the critical criterion for considering the locality to buy a home. Most customers view properties in areas with lower air pollution levels closer to nature and those that offer easy access to highways. 

5. Continued Focus on Infrastructure Development and Industrial Growth

PropTech or property Technology is yet another growing trend that is prevailing in the real estate industry. Under PropTech, 6 technologies have surfaced to dominate the real estate space, including:

• SaaS
• Artificial Intelligence
• Internet of Things
• Robotic Process Automation
• Virtual / Augmented Reality, and
• Blockchain

Several real estate brokers in India and providers are using PropTech to help boost their customer services, offering customers the ease of use and the ability to view the property remotely using the latest technologies.

This is a preference not just for outstation or NRI buyers who cannot physically visit the property; even local buyers prefer to first look at the property and its facilities online before visiting in person. BeyondWalls is the future and will make real estate investment and buying simple and transparent.

6. Investment Aspect to Grow

Real estate is no longer seen just from the prism of home buying or commercial use. Still, it is also considered an excellent investment opportunity by many. In India, institutional investment in real estate has doubled annually to touch $1.1 billion during Q1 2022, and foreign investment accounted for 70% of the inflow. The remaining 30% came from domestic investment, which has regained pre-pandemic levels.

With the rise in demand for co-working spaces and rising influx to metro cities given the higher job opportunities, this sector will continue to see strong interest and significant growth. 

Conclusion

The real estate industry has displayed that despite disruptions and uncertainty, the real estate demand in India has not gone down and will not any time soon. The rising demand for co-working spaces and commercial properties from the residential property, increased demand for data centers, and other vital factors will play a decisive role in enabling the Indian real estate growth.

Metro cities will benefit significantly from this rising demand. While India is witnessing a solid real estate push, reports suggest that Bengaluru can be the country’s favourite real estate investment destination, followed by interest in growing cities like Ahmedabad, Pune, Chennai, Goa, and Dehradun.