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| Edited By: Ateeq Shaikh |Source: DNA |Updated: Mar 22, 2018, 02:29 AM IST
We are a leading portal of the country now. We are leading by a reasonably large margin as compared to anyone else.
Most of the companies in property portal are private companies so there are no declared numbers as such. Only one is a public company. So when you look at the market share, I think different players have given different yardsticks on the basis of which they measure the market share. But if you ask us, if you look at traffic or revenue or total listings on the website, we would say, based on which metric you look at, we have something between 37% and 45% of the market share.
The market share on the basis of revenue is a different number and market share on the basis of traffic is a different number. For revenue, we are guessing here as only one company is public and declares its revenue numbers – 99acres.com. The other companies are really private, so it is only the market intelligence we have on how much revenue would they be doing. But our guess is that we have between 35% and 40% market share on revenue basis. For traffic we have about 40% share.
To be fair, it is to be each their own. What strategy they chose is for them to pick, and I guess each brand picks its strategy based on circumstances it finds itself in. But let's put it this way, by and large housing.com was created on the premise of serving the rental customers and it did look odd that a year or a year-and-a-half later they themselves chose to abandon that segment and chase the new project segment. Having said it, may be they feel that's the right strategy under the circumstances.
We have seen ourselves as a portal that should be present in every segment of property. So all along we have been part of the resale market as well as the new construction projects. We have also been part of the buy as well as the rental segment. We have had commercial on our side and PG on our side. We have always seen ourselves as having to play a role in all segments and we have done justice to it, so today on our side about 45% of the traffic and listings are actually in the rental segment. So while we make most of the revenues from buy segment we serve all consumers.
We have two revenue streams – banner ads which builders and agents buy and we have property listings. In the rental segment, listings are mostly bought by agents including premium listings. Individuals sometimes upgrade and buy the premium listings, so that's the revenue stream.
We have a lot of interesting products coming up and something that we think are quite disruptive. There's a mobile application in beta (testing) version and full launch is coming up later this month, that product is called Prop Worth. It's an app, all you have to do is key in in which society or apartment you live in and also a few details like what's the square feet of your house and which floor you reside and if it's facing any premium side like garden or anything, and in a jiffy it will tell you what your property worth is likely to be. We think it is a disruptive thing, though it looks innocuous. The reason why it is disruptive is because there are very few sources for an average consumer to figure out what is the right value of property in the country. This will tell you the value of almost all apartments or societies at least in the top six metros of Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Pune, Hyderabad and Chennai. It is going to be all across, but as we start there are pockets where we are going to show more rates and trends, and there are pockets where we will show prices all along. So it will work better in the top six cities as we begin, eventually, we hope to cover about 35 cities. This app is going to leverage the data that we have. Like this we have about 2-3 very interesting products.
No one has an app like this. We really aspire that we should have 60% of the market share of this category after a whole bunch of things that we are doing, Prop Worth being one of them.
We are also putting up an experience centre, over an area of 200 square feet in which you will be able to experience magicbricks offline. It's going to be a reasonably hi-tech centre with touchscreens, virtual reality devices and augmented reality. We would pretty much be able to see properties on Mumbai right here at the metro rail station in Mumbai, using the devices. This is the first one for us nationally. No experience centre has been put up by any property portal in India.
