Unable to choose your dream house? Realty Compass launches project rating to help you

India’s first project search engine Realty Compass has announced an exciting feature of rating the listed projects on their portal. With this project rating in place, one can now look for sweet spots in a locality which have a good overall rating and yet are reasonably priced.

The news follows the recent announcement by Housing to make public the real time data of demand and supply in real estate. We at YourStory spoke to Sankara, Co-founder of Realty Compass to know the real deal with project rating and their future plans:

Project Rating – a function of brand, accessibility and amenities

Project Rating is based on an overall score out of 100, where a project is rated on three parameters namely:Builder Rating: How reliable and credible the builder is? This constitutes almost 40% of the rating. Builder rating is derived considering the past performance of the builder, total assets under construction; and consumer demand of his projects.

Accessibility Rating: How accessible is the location? This factor makes for 30% of the rating. It analyzes the location of the project with respect to nearby shopping areas, gardens, noise polluting sources, metro stations, railway station, highway and even destinations like Café Coffee Days. In short, it can be described as a function of the following:

Accessibility rating = f (Open Spaces Around) + f (Accessibility to good quality lifestyle) + f (Mass Rapid transportation)

Amenities Rating: How the project fairs in terms of amenities and hence quality of lifestyle in the project? This parameter accounts for the remaining 30% of the rating. For every project, amenities are classified into buckets of essential amenities (security, power back-up etc.), sports amenities (club house, badminton court etc.) and health amenities (RO treatment plant, jogging track etc.)

Sankara says, “We have included all the factors which a customer will look for. In short, project rating is an indicative rating which helps you do a quick selection / rejection of the project on the basis of the parameters given.” He adds, “We are also working on adding two more vital parameters in the future -- water availability and safety.”

Real estate – a market full of opportunities

The recent times have witnessed many announcements in the real estate space from Housing, Flat.to and Commonfloor. However, it is important to know to what extent are these startups addressing the needs of the consumer. Sankara says,

If nothing, it’s a great validation of the space and justifies our presence here. All the tools and technology from our end (or from the other players’) are offering the consumer an easy way to find a property of his choice. People moving to Bangalore or Chennai who are not aware of local builders, need an unbiased and reliable assistance. Realty Compass is very scientific in its approach and we are filling that gap.

He adds, “We provide project-to-project recommendation to a first time user and after few visits we can even give suggestions based on his previous searches (person-to-person recommendation). In the same direction, our ratings (project, builder, amenities and accessibility) are based on thousands of data points which are captured every day. They are refreshed every week to take into account newer data points.”

More announcements down the line

Sankara had earlier mentioned about launching a mobile app and a new feature which will be a ‘refreshing way to do a quick search’. He says, “There are too many things going around and we’ll be launching the app in a month’s time (with a delay). However, the feature is live on the website now. It is the ‘Express Search’ in beta phase currently. This enables a user to see pie-charts of projects sorted by localities, prices, possession status and more.”

Realty Compass is a promising venture with many more features and announcements to follow. They claim that two-thirds of their listings is not available anywhere else on the internet. Clearly, they have worked very hard to make their product extremely scientific and analytical.

What do you have to say about this new feature? Comment below.