This Jaipur-based real estate startup is eyeing Rs 100 Cr sales in its second year of operations
The Pink City is witnessing a boom in the real estate market. By 2025, Jaipur is likely to become a mega city with a population of 10 million covering an area of 800 sq. km. The city is going to see an exponential growth in real estate segment in the coming years; which means even more properties, even more buyers.
The Real Estate market is traditionally very chaotic. The Indian market in terms of real estate consultancy is worth more than $20 billion, of which, 30 per cent is the primary sales market and 70 per cent is the secondary sales market. Unfortunately, not even 10 per cent of the entire market is organized. Buyers often get lost in the sea of builders, brokers and properties.
Krishna Gupta, a former Larsen and Toubro employee, faced similar chaos while searching for a property in Jaipur. The disorderly real estate market with its unorganized brokers’ segment made his job an extremely trying one. However, it gave him some first-hand experience of the shortcomings in the sector. After some research, he decided to enter the segment, with an aim to provide better and more accurate information about properties that were available to buyers in the city.
In June, 2014, Krishna Gupta founded Propterry, a new generation real estate consultancy and management firm. It aims at providing both - the most accurate information and cutting edge real estate services, to real estate buyers.
“What triggered me of to launch this venture was the goal to bridge the gap between the buyers and the information delivered to them. I believe that there needs to be a catalyst that can nurture this relationship and bring maximum transparency. We want to become one of the catalysts that can organize, refine and automate this industry,” says Krishna.
He further added that the current real estate portals suffer from a lack of adequate information about the various listed properties. The brokers are extremely unorganized, and at times, even unfair to the individual customer. The brokerage fee itself is a deterrent for customers. Besides, the online property portals are not fully user-friendly, on account of the lack of relevant information.
“After analysing the problem, we are planning to educate the consumer by a mass-scale media advertising campaign, as well as through innovative information feeds on our portal, propterry.com,” says Krishna.
So, what’s new in it?
Propterry claims to be strategically different from the other portals, which are primarily online property classifieds, and don’t have any offline end-to-end offering. It also claims that it is providing cutting edge services to existing owners of properties, which is the most unique proposition of the venture.
“Now, we are working on the technology, the operations, and the process to organize second sales by franchise automation; this is an essential ingredient in our goal to achieve national scalability. We want to work on new technology to design a better user experience. Besides, we want to automate the real estate transactions by reducing the transaction time by about 50 per cent,” says Krishna.
Gaining traction and growth
This self-funded venture was started with an initial capital of Rs. 1 lakh and has been able to survive. It spent the capital on team building, research & development, business development, and technology.
Propterry has got a positive response from the market. It claims to have more than 4500 enquiries, of which, 4 per cent have been converted into sales, and more than 20 per cent of them are still in the system and are work in progress. The supplier side is healthy, too, as it has over 25 Developers on board.
It has sold properties worth more than Rs. 30 crore with average sales team strength of just 3 people. It has a target of achieving sales worth more than Rs. 100 crore this year.
Propterry has also been in talks with some investors and is looking forward to raise funding in the next few months.
Competition
Only about 10 per cent of the Real Estate market is organized. There is a dire need to bring in professional players, competition and fair play in the market. “What we believe is that competition improves services, so it’s a good thing. The market size is huge; there’s room for many,” says Krishna.
Propterry has plans to expand beyond Jaipur. It aims to offer services in Tier 1 and Tier 2 markets by the end of this financial year. It also plans to launch other tertiary services that will add considerable value to their product. It is betting big on the Tier 2 markets as they estimate the market potential there to be huge.