Over fifty per cent of real estate buyers’ decisions are influenced by Internet research and it’s not limited to metros but also extended to buyers in tier II cities, according to a study by Google India.
The overall influence of Internet on real estate transaction value of both residential and commercial property including rentals amounted to $43 billion, with $31 billion for residential and $12 billion for commercial properties.
Nitin Bawankule, Industry Director, Goggle India, said “It is clear that Internet today, is emerging as the top destination for researching before finalizing any high value purchase and the consumer behavior is no different for real estate purchases. Real estate queries on Google search have been growing consistently registering over 3x growth in the last three years, the rate of query growth is even higher for tier 2 cities and growing at over 350 per cent.”
The survey was conducted across 15 cities including Delhi and NCR, Mumbai, Pune, lucknow, Jaipur, Indore, Coimbatore, Chandigarh, Nagpur and Bangalore with over 6,000 respondents revealed that 74 per cent of real estate research online was focused on residential buying and 26 percent focused on residential renting.
“Yes, specially in cities with high youth population and IT industry,” said CREDAI Chairman lalit Kumar Jain, when asked about the influence of internet on real estate purchases.
However, he added that “still there are many people who believes in visiting the location.”
According to report in tier 1 cities over 57 per cent buyers were influenced by online research and in tier 2 cities the impact was equally high with 48 per cent buyers saying that they used Internet to research for real estate purchase decisions.
The usage of mobile phones for accessing real estate information online was also significant with over 55 per cent buyers using it to access the information. This finding was consistent with Google search, with mobile contributing to over 40 per cent real estate queries on Google search. Mobile apps were preferred over websites by buyers with 73 per cent respondents saying they prefer to use mobile apps .
“It is estimated that the real estate industry will grow to become a $140 billion by 2017 and the Internet audience base is expected to reach over 450 million by then.
There is tremendous opportunity for both online real estate aggregators, brokers and developers to engage the buyers online by providing rich, meaningful and immersive experience to buyers on the Internet, including mobile ready online assets as the trends are consistent both in metro and tier 2 cities.” Nitin Bawankule added.