PropertyPistol | One-Stop-Shop for Real Estate in India

• ByStartupStory     |    May 6, 2022

“From the buyer’s point of view, we want to become a one-stop shop for real estate in India as I strongly believe that there has been no buyer-focused real estate company in the country. We want people to think of PropertyPistol when they think of real estate. And we are moving aggressively and strongly towards that direction,” said Ashish Narain Agarwal, Founder & CEO of PropertyPistol in an exclusive interview with Startup Story.

PropertyPistol is silently heralding a revolution in Indian real estate. Having been in existence for over 9 years, the company has come a long way and carved a niche for itself in a seemingly cluttered market of Indian real estate. The founding team members – Ashish Narain Agarwal and Tushar Shrivastava, both IIT-ians, believed that technology could help bring a transformation and a positive difference to the home buyers who are most underserved in this market.

Launched in 2013, PropertyPistol offers revolutionary tech offerings for the real estate brokers to simplify their business in order to create an ecosystem for buyers to transact in real estate with complete peace of mind and under an overarching umbrella of trust.

Ashish Narain Agarwal, Founder & CEO of PropertyPistol envisions a sector that has all the key stakeholders in the real estate industry i.e. the buyers, builders and real estate brokers aligned with the help of technology, thereby creating immense value in the entire ecosystem.

Tushar Shrivastava, Co-Founder & CTO, PropertyPistol has brought staggering technological advancement to the company. His dedication and passion for technology have helped in the development of unique tech offerings.

What’s unique about PropertyPistol?

There were three key challenges faced by home buyers during a property purchase – Property Identification, Price Discovery and Documentation. While identifying a property, the home buyers did not have exhaustive data to search from. Even if there were a host of property options, there was no guidance or support to direct them the right way, which ultimately lead to an unfulfilling transaction. As the customers hop on from one project to another aimlessly, there is a considerable amount of time taken in decision making. Another crucial factor is credibility, trust and transparency. A buyer may not be confident about the price of a property and he may not have good bargaining power. Some home buyers are unaware of the financial and legal aspects involved in purchasing a property. PropertyPistol handholds the homebuyers through the entire home buying journey. The website offers an exhaustive list of properties and the home buyers are not left alone to search, understand and analyse. There is a team of professionals designated to each home buyer to cater to their specific needs and assist them in every phase of the transaction.

Explaining the core objective of PropertyPistol, Agarwal adds “Our only aim is to offer complete convenience to the buyers and we are the only B2C real estate consultancy in the country. In order to offer a fulfilling home buying experience to a customer, it is essential to align the key stakeholders in the business – the brokers and developers. Hence, we have put in a lot of effort towards implementing technology that can simplify the way brokers operate and have created a robust mechanism through research and data analytics to cater to every minute requirement of a home buyer to ensure they get their dream home.”

How has the home buyer benefited from this?

“Our internal analytics has revealed some amazing stats. The time taken to complete a successful transaction has commendably come down, the deal loss rate has lowered significantly, and we have set in motion cross border transactions (a person in Delhi can now easily transact in far-off regions like Mumbai, Bangalore without being present physically) only by leveraging technology at its best”, said Shrivastava.

PropertyPistol has sold inventory worth over INR 5000 cr in FY 2021-22. The last three months (Jan 2022 – March 2022) have been the best in the company’s history. In March 2022 alone, PropertyPistol sold over 750 properties.

“Technology has been our major growth driver. Over the last 4 years, the company’s gross transaction value (GTV) has increased almost 10 times and there is a 7x growth in the number of units sold. We are easily capturing 1.8% market share in the top metro cities in India and have become major contributors of business to the top developers in the country.” commented Shrivastava.

“We have been the largest selling partners for all the top developers in the country, selling close to 10% of top builders’ sales and we hope to reach close to 25% to 30% of the developer’s inventory. Our objective is also to become the choicest platform for brokers to get connected and aggregated both from resale/rental as well as primary sales segments,” said Agarwal.

PropertyPistol’s Tech Offerings

PropertyPistol has developed an in-house app called PropertyPistol Syndicate. This is made exclusively for real estate brokers and enables aggregation and engagement amongst them. The core objective is to empower the brokers by getting them trained and upskilled. This app identifies top-rated brokers of a locality and connects them to the customers. The broker is rated at every interaction – be it with the customer or the sales team to maintain the highest standards of rating. With PropertyPistol’s exhaustive listing database, the broker can offer better property options to customers both in terms of quality and quantity. Added to this, the broker gets a client management interface as well so that no client interaction is missed.

The entire app interface of PropertyPistol Syndicate is developed and led by a robust research and development team, that understands the real pain points and challenges a broker, developer and home buyer face on an everyday basis. Every feature within the app is designed to offer convenience, seamless transition and a quick response mechanism to ensure no time wastage for the broker community. The most beneficial feature for a broker is the ‘Post Sales Comment’ in which he can track updates in real-time on whether the home buyer has paid the registration fee and by when the brokerage is due from the builder. He need not make calls to the buyer or the developer and can easily track these details with the click of a button. PropertyPistol helps the broker in facilitating and collecting the brokerage at the same rate that he would get if he did not associate with PropertyPistol. The advanced tech-enabled features in PropertyPistol Syndicate allow necessary filters and relevant matches to ensure efficient networking between the brokers and allow them to connect.

This unique tech offering by PropertyPistol has helped in bringing about transparency in a broker’s dealings because each broker on the app is rated and reviewed. The company has a lot of brokers registered on the app who have successfully enabled transactions in far-off regions without personally being present on the site. PropertyPistol Syndicate has also helped brokers to quicken their transactions due to which the deal loss rate has gone down considerably. So far, the company has successfully onboarded over 15,000 sub-broker members on the platform.

“As far as empanelment is concerned, the Syndicate platform is open for all RERA registered brokers. We also do individual ratings both at a broker-to-broker and individual transaction levels. Based upon this, we identify the best brokers and a group of only qualified brokers are assigned to connect to the buyer.” said Agarwal

Yet another offering from PropertyPistol is Radiate. PropertyPistol Radiate is a platform that tracks every RERA registered project in a particular region, irrespective of the segment the project caters to. This builder aggregation platform is developed to mitigate the key challenge of lack of property options for home buyers and inaccessibility to relevant data. PropertyPistol gathers data through various registration portals to analyse and see what transaction has been done historically in a particular locality, understand the price trends and how real estate in a particular market is shaping up. With this information, PropertyPistol presents the most suitable options to a homebuyer depending on his requirement.

The loan vertical of the company – PropertyPistol Loanz – seeks to offer the best deal to homebuyers through collaboration with leading housing finance institutions. The company provides end-to-end loan support by leveraging the widespread network of banking institutions.

PropertyPistol also has a robust system in place for the internal management of sales including Telecalling, CRM for lead management, CRM Report App, Primary Sales Tools for post-sales operations and incentive calculations, and HRMS for HR and accounting management. This automation has rapidly improved productivity metrics and has helped lower the cost to the company and lower the cancellation of leads.

PropertyPistol’s business during the pandemic

The year 2021 was quite eventful for the real estate sector despite the challenges posed by COVID-19 induced issues. If there is one thing we can take away from this year, it would be that the Indian real estate sector is quite resilient and despite all the factors that had, on several occasions, dipped the sentiments, the sector still saw tremendous growth potential.

“Although the FY 2020-21 was challenging owing to the pandemic, it was quite balanced for PropertyPistol.com. Through the mid-2020, the company started witnessing momentum in sales and by the third quarter of FY20-21, PropertyPistol almost doubled the sale of units and we are rapidly increasing this number to date,” said Agarwal.

Upcoming Technology

With the prominence of technology and the internet becoming more accessible, people have been opting for digital mediums for property search which is helping them to reduce the time to buy a property. Multiple advanced technology solutions are helping real estate businesses today and the key is to adequately utilise the power of technology for the benefit of our customers and business.

Commenting on PropertyPistol’s plans to launch new tech offerings, Shrivastava added, “At PropertyPistol, we are focused towards increasing our digital touchpoints with the buyers by way of a comprehensive set of listings on our website and a soon-to-be-launched B2C app with features like virtual site visits, property owners/tenant connects, etc. This app is going to be a utility platform for real estate, rich with features in which buyers get to directly connect with brokers across India monitored by the professional team at PropertyPistol. Similar to Uber and Ola for cabs and Swiggy or Zomato for restaurants, we aim to integrate this new B2C platform with the Syndicate app so that homebuyers and brokers can engage fruitfully, seamlessly and with transparency. A virtual site visit is also on our minds as it is a must-have, futuristic tech in the real estate sector and will help in zero-time wastage during closure.”

Growth and Market Size of Real Estate

In India, 2.5 lakh properties are sold in the residential segment and there are top regions in the country contributing to more than 75% of the entire market inventory. These markets are Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, Delhi NCR, Noida, Gurgaon, Hyderabad, Chennai and Kolkata. The biggest positive development in Indian real estate is the implementation of RERA which has changed the dynamics of the sector. We are witnessing consolidation in the market with big, trusted developers that are professionally managed taking over smaller developers that are not able to scale or sustain.

India has very stable and progressive governance and there has been good economic growth despite the COVID-19 led pandemic. There is ample foreign investment coming in and the investor sentiment is bullish about the Indian economy. The infrastructure development push by the central and the state governments have been immense which will open up accessibility to peripheral regions and hence create a great scope for the realty sector. The purchasing power of people has spiked and there is greater spending on the back of higher pay packages and the desire for a better standard of living.

When asked about how the real estate sector has changed in the last few years, Agarwal added, “There has been a shift to bigger sized apartments unlike earlier. When we started in 2013, our average ticket size used to be INR 55 lacs and now it is around INR 90 lacs. There is great momentum in the luxury segment, especially in areas like South Mumbai unlike earlier. More and more people are opting for homes with features, amenities and convenience. The affordable segment has also seen an uptick and the apartments in this segment have considerably increased; today we are selling around 600 apartments every month in the affordable segment. RERA has also been one of the most prominent developments in Indian real estate. After RERA, there has been a radical shift in the quality of inventories and the trusted brands that these inventories come from.”

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