App invites builders to cut costs, reach out to buyers

Nikita Peer

Souring realty sales, escalating taxes, a cash crunch, unsavoury government diktats and, let’s not forget, the recessionary phase that has left developers wincing. One way to work around these challenges is to upgrade to technology that saves costs while enabling more sales. For a developer, that’s money in the bank. Yet less than 5 per cent of builders use technology solutions or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions in their business.

Bangalore-based start-up Sadanika Solutions has launched www.homebuy360.com, which is a simple, effective and efficient tool to make selling and buying homes a transparent exercise. It manages all the interactions and transactions between builder and buyer while saving administration costs for developers and improving customer care. So from bookings, document creation, collection, email and SMS notifications and handling buyer grievances, the application manages all these back-office tasks. Home buyers, on the other hand, get an update at every stage of the construction process.

The company was founded by Kshitij Minglani, Rajat Kothari and A K Gururaj in 2011, with a capital investment of Rs 1 crore through personal savings and a little help from their mentors. “When we saw our colleagues at Infosys buying apartments, we realised that the communication post-sale was manual, ineffective and failed to provide proper customer care. The opportunity and need for a cloud-based application was apparent,” recalls Minglani.

A Win-Win Proposition
To use this application, builders are provided personalised logins through which they can monitor construction updates, documentation, payment alerts and receipts, project photographs, customer grievances, buyer referrals and bank connect. Buyers are given a secured login address, which can be accessed across the globe. The developer can also address all customer grievances and get referrals from buyers, thereby ensuring better customer connect and getting more prospective buyers.

The company has also devised solutions to help home buyers authenticate the best buy. “The idea is to leverage homebuy360 as a one-stop shop. While the application helps buyers find their dream homes, it also takes care of post-sale management. On homefind360, a buyer can write their need in the bar (for instance, 2BHK apartment at Chembur for less than 80L) and the results will be displayed. To help make a choice, information on schools, hospitals, companies, metro stations located near the property and other information is also displayed. The results are sorted by a proprietary algorithm that takes into account property price, quality of project, the builder’s experience, location, legal perspective and much more,” explains Kothari.

Revenue Model
The promising part is that the company uses multiple business models. “We operate on the pay-per-user, pay-over-time, pay-as-you-sell or pay-per-project models. Developers may also tie up with us for all their projects. The developer does not invest in the hardware or installation; they merely pay us a fee for the licence and then pay for an annual subscription. We do not have standard pricing for any of the models, so the pricing is subjective as currently our start-up is not focusing on maximising profits. We want to get a firm foothold in the market,” reveals Minglani, who adds that the typical price of our base version is kept at around Rs 14 lakhs.

Why Homebuy360?
The Return On Investment for the developer is three to four times over the lifecycle of a residential project, says Minglani. “We are making sales and back office more effective, undertaking bookings, maintaining all the information in one place and creating documentation, which saves 2 per cent of the project revenue. So, if a developer has a project volume of Rs 200 crore, he saves Rs 4 crore over the lifecycle of the project. Within 3 months, he makes up for his expenditure on homebuy360.”

Homebuy360 includes an integrated product called homefind360, which can be accessed from the home page on the website. The application is a platform for free advertisement of various realty projects and does not contribute to the company. “Homefind360 required a capital investment of Rs 25-30 lakh. On developing it, we realised that we had to compete with biggies like 99 acres and Magicbricks, which requires lots of marketing capital. Thus, at present, homefind360 is free for developers and buyers and we are looking at adding value to homebuy360 through this integrated product. There is no direct monetisation from homefind360,” says Kothari.

Expansion Plans
The company has about 25 clients including Nambiar Developers, Monarch Properties, Rajesh LifeSpaces, Adhiraj Constructions, Grow Homes, PBEL, among others from Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad and Chennai. Their turnover for the current financial year is estimated to touch Rs 1 crore.

“We are now looking at creating an ecosystem of brokers-builders-buyers-banks to connect effectively through technology and become a one-stop shop, from finding a home to enjoying a ‘ready-to-live home’,” says Minglani. So from vendors who sell home furnishings to manufacturers of electronic appliances and banks that offer home loans, everyone connected to a new home will be integrated into homebuy360.

Almost every aspect of life is impacted by technology and it was only a matter of time before the tech-immune real estate sector discovered its benefits. Even though these benefits include helping sustain growth, increasing productivity and serving customers better, it will be a while before developers in India embrace its power. But for builders who want to cut their teeth, homebuy360 is a promising start.

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