 "Jason Kothari, Chief executive officer, Housing.com")
Earlier, monetisation happened through products on desktop. Now, we have sped up the process of creating products on mobile, Jason Kothari tells Sangeeta Tanwar.
Housing.com went through tumultuous time with the unsavoury exit of its co-founder Rahul Yadav. What steps did you take to rebuild the brand over the past one year or so?
First, we have refocused the company to be regarded as the most trusted brand for buying and selling property in the country because these are the largest revenue generating segments in real estate. A year back Housing.com was working in many categories like rent etc. We have closed a lot of these ancillary services. This focus has helped us in increasing the real estate inventory on the platform. From 130,000 homes listed in April 2015, our platform today offers over 630,000 home listings, the largest selection of homes in India. That is a 500 per cent growth. The number of visits for buying and selling homes on Housing.com has gone up from 1.3 million a year ago to over four million today. The growth rate here is nearly 200 per cent.
Buying and selling a house is a big financial decision for a consumer. So touch and feel and security of transaction are key concerns influencing this decision. What are the initiatives that you have taken to address these concerns?
Real estate is a space where consumers research extensively before finalising on a home. To earn and build consumer trust, we have strengthened the Indian Real Estate forum which is the largest online community in the real estate space. It receives 3,40,000 monthly sessions and has 180,000 monthly users. Second, we have launched Housing News, a content led initiative. It generates 150 original articles every month and attracts 100,000 views and is published on highly reputable sites like Moneycontrol.
In what ways has mobile disrupted the online real estate classified business?
The mobile is increasingly playing a large role in shaping and influencing the online real estate business. With the proliferation of smartphones and more affordable data packages, more people are logging in through the mobile than the desktop. About 18 months back 30-35 per cent of the overall traffic for Housing.com was coming from mobile. Today it’s 55-70 per cent. We are focusing our energies in improving the mobile experience for users. We have revamped our mobile website. Earlier, the desktop website was given priority; now most of the features and offerings are developed simultaneously for the desktop and the mobile. Also, from the monetisation perspective, originally, monetisation happened through products on the desktop. Now, we have accelerated the process of creating a number of products for the mobile.
What are the key areas of investment to improve user experience?
We are working towards establishing our presence in high demand localities by providing consumers the widest selection of homes. Currently, we are present in seven metros which consists of 4,000 localities. About 400 localities in these seven metros collectively account for 75 per cent of the demand in the real estate space. We are very focused on those 400 localities. We are also big on technology. We have acquired Reality Business Intelligence, the largest data analytics company in real estate in India. We have a team of 300 data collectors. The team collects over 100 data points for every property listed on our platform. So we are not only offering the largest selection of homes on our platform but we are also providing the biggest data set for the listed homes. All this helps us in promoting transparency and building trust among buyers using our platform.
Since Housing.com’s debut in 2012 how has the online real estate space evolved and where is the industry headed?
At $200 million, the classified space in online retail estate is still very small but it’s growing very fast. For example, in India online spend in real estate is pegged at two to three per cent, whereas in China and the US, the market sands at 25 per cent 35 per cent, respectively. Housing.com is a late entrant in this space which has players like 99acres, Magicbricks and Commonfloor who have been in the industry for much longer. Our unique selling point, I believe, has been our ability to offer customers a superior value, better user experience, greater transparency leveraging technology and particularly data analytics. Increased competition has improved the health of the industry as it requires everyone to improve the quality of service for consumers, developers and brokers.
