‘We’re confident that the Indian housing market is entering a bull phase’

Amid the news about Noida’s “twin towers” tumbling down and China’s imminent housing market collapse, we spoke to Snehil Gautam, Chief Growth and Marketing Officer, Housing.com, Makaan.com & Proptiger.com, who came across as quietly confident that the Indian real estate industry was entering a bull phase, after a long bear run.

“REA India (the parent company) comprises three brands Housing.com, Makaan.com and Proptiger.com, and if you just look at numbers from third party trackers, Housing.com is the number 1 real estate platform in terms of monthly visits and sessions,” Gautam shares.

“We saw a remarkable growth of over 50 per cent YOY in our audience footfall last year. We have also launched multiple services under our full stack rental business, Housing EDGE, which has further accelerated the organisation's growth. Since October 2021, Housing.com has maintained a leadership stance in terms of audience or traffic and will strive to continue this pace in the coming years as well,” he added.

“We’re a classified business and by that I mean we sell visibility packages to our sellers, that are the brokers, developers, and owners, and we earn from that visibility that we sell. So, it’s extremely important for us to remain the market leader in terms of audience,” says Gautam, adding that the company has launched three successful campaigns so far for Housing.com, with the latest being the TV and digital advertising campaign, Parr…se Perfect.

Gautam says that through this ad campaign, the brand was communicating a message to audiences that it is okay to have doubts when it comes to buying, selling or renting a home. “We all have doubts and we shouldn’t bury them. At Housing.com we are celebrating even the smallest of doubts as we are committed to providing maximum property options to home seekers and maximum customers to sellers and landlords,” he said.

And then there is the inevitable Covid question. “Even when these things aren’t happening it’s challenging because you are selling the highest ticket purchase of a human’s lifetime, one that they will only make once or twice in general. Having said that, what we’ve seen after Covid, is the most significant surge in transactions and launches happening in India,” he says.

Noting that real estate comes in bull and bear cycles, Gautam says that since 2013 the housing market was seeing a bear cycle where the prices didn’t move, launches were muted. “Since Covid there has been tremendous momentum in the sector, and we believe we’re on the cusp of a bull cycle now, which will last for at least five years,” he says.

Addressing the Noida “twin towers” incident, he believes it will serve as a good deterrent to bad players in the market. “The government itself has been doing good work by implementing RERA (Real Estate Regulatory Authority), which provides some relief to consumers. I think for future buyers and renters the sector will be much cleaner and create trust, which honestly was in a deficit in this sector,” he says.

As with so many other industries, the pandemic has also led to the adoption of digital solutions in housing, with Gautam observing that pre-pandemic it was hard to get consumers, especially from Tier II cities, to come online for their discovery journey. “The only green shoot we saw from this disaster was that we started to see people from Tier II, Tier III cities come online for their home discovery and our traffic has grown significantly since Covid,” he says.

There are also some key differences in user needs. “We’ve discovered that they prefer content in vernacular. They prefer WhatsApp over browsing the site and videos over text content. As a company, we’ve taken huge steps in curating experiences for them, recognizing that these new segments have different needs from Tier I cities. We’re available in seven languages, we have been using WhatsApp as a platform very aggressively,” says Gautam.

“We’re seeing the most momentum in Tier II and III cities as more people are online and that just means more business for us. Similarly in Tier I, we’re seeing a lot more launches. And since these launches and creation of products cost a lot of money, and the fact that developers are ready to spend that money means that they are confident as well in the growth of the sector,” he concluded.