Start making real estate investment decisions using market research data, and not intuition

In todays world, technology has enabled consumers to the extent that no one goes to eat out before doing online research about where they want to eat, how much they want to pay and what they want to eat. Imagine if someone is willing to do this much pre analysis just to have a meal, how much research they will do if they have to make a real estate investment given an average Indian makes Single real estate investment in their lifetime.

Even with advancement in technology, a local real estate agent is still making decisions based on intuition and very limited market research data on locality, which ultimately leads to very low conversion rate. A survey conducted among real estate agents in Mumbai revealed that the average conversion rate per month is around 2%, that is for every 100 customers who inquires about a property, only 2 end up closing a deal.

Another study conducted among consumers who want to either buy or rent a residential or commercial property showed that most of them feel that local real estate agents are not able to cater to their needs/requirements and instead force clients to invest in the properties they have; this ultimately results into customer churn. Further the survey results showed that consumers will prefer an agent who can acts as an advisor and would use technology and data to guide them through the process instead of old fashioned intuition based decision making process. For example, say customer A is looking for a residential property as an investment and customer B who is married with kids is looking for a residential property to raise his family; both want to buy a residential property but their requirement is very different from each other. Customer A might like a property next to a train station or college or shopping complex because of high rental income and future growth, on the other hand customer B might like a property next to a school and garden and in a safe neighborhood with less crime rate. A successful agent should be equipped with all these data points on their smartphone or laptops in order to help clients make smart decisions and close the deal faster. Time has come that local real estate agents in India use technology to guide clients if they want to survive in this competitive environment.

‍