Can Technology Disrupt the real Estate Fog in India?

Real Estate in India has generally remained away from technology, especially the internet. The main reason for this has been the fact that real estate sector has always been thought of as a hardware sector and soft skills had no place. Somehow, Real estate property has remained aloof form the fast developing IT infrastructure and technological advancements in various fields, which could contribute tremendously towards making real estate a progressive sector. Real estate has been uncomfortable to embrace soft technology also because it avoids transparency.  As the sector is connected with a number of illegal and unethical practises and technology has the power to clean up the system, it has been deliberately avoided.

The real estate sector needs to realise that internet and technology are here to stay, the faster the sector adopts technology the transition would be smooth, else it would be disruptive. The Indian consumer in the past few years has transformed into a smart user, technology has empowered him to analyse, compare and choose as per his will and desire, we can say that he has been spoilt for choice. It is predicted that 20 billion things will be connected by IOT by 2020 and there would be 5 billion smart phone users’ world over. The smartphone segment has grown 35% y on y till 2015 and is predicted to grow at 37% by end of 2016 in India. By end of 2015 India was estimated to have 239 million smartphone users, having pegged USA for the first time. 60% of internet users in India access the net through their smartphones. In 2015, mobile data traffic in India accounted for 11% of wireless and wireline traffic cumulatively, and the share is expected to swell to 34% by 2020. Mobile traffic per user in India is expected to reach 1,704 megabytes per month by 2020-a huge leap from 185 megabytes per month in 2015, along with a CAGR of 56%. The average smartphone generated 430 megabytes of mobile data traffic per month in 2015, almost doubling up from 299 megabytes per month in 2014. This is expected to touch 2 GB by 2020. There are more than 114.63 million mobile subscribers in India, who access 3G/4G networks to get their everyday tasks done through the web. All these figures are suggestive of the humungous growth potential of the online market and services in India in the years to come.

From pencils to fridges; undergarments to electronics; perishables to automobiles the Indian consumer is purchasing almost anything and everything on the net. Integration, synergy and technology are making life and business simply smart. Whether the real state sector likes it or not it needs to embrace smart technologies and grow up to them in case it envisions to expand, grow and flourish. IOT is the future and is going to be the disruptive technology in the coming years at a very fast rate. The real estate sector needs to graduate and exploit technology to reach out to potential consumers who are more and more going to rely on smart technologies.

As far as the Real estate in India is concerned this basically implies that it needs to come out with a clean and transparent approach, which gives the end user the confidence and certainty to access reliable, unbiased and factual information, online. Real estate firms in India need to embrace technology in a manner which empowers the end user with so much of authentic information that the need to visit and verify the inputs on ground should not arise at all. The end achievable state should be that an individual investor is able to purchase a property with the same ease and confidence with which he buys any product online.