Imagine that you are moving to a new city and looking for a place for rent. What will you do? You will ideally ask for recommendations from someone you know. Maybe you will look online for those localities that are close to your office. You will probably search properties on a real estate portal and get in touch with the owner of a property you liked. Just because you liked a property doesn’t guarantee that you will get the property. You will need to convince the homeowner why you will be a better tenant. If it doesn’t work out the process restarts.
Too much work right?
Several members within our team had similar personal experience. We planned to listen to hundreds of customer conversations with the agents and homeowners and did a market research to understand crucial aspects that come into play while looking for a rental property. We tried to understand the varied range of preferences of landlords for renting out a property.
“Rental Profiling” was envisioned in this context. This feature helps us in going beyond the traditional definition of a lead. Choosing a place to live is close to our heart. Rental Profiling is all about understanding the preferences and expectations of the user and directing them to the most relevant properties.
On our platform, rent seekers can now clearly mention their preferences like when and how they are moving in, work location etc. and find matching properties.
Building on this data we are providing personalized search experience to our users which takes into account the aspirations, aptness and affordability of the user thus saving them from the paradox of choice and helping find the most suitable properties for them. This includes recommendations on where to look for properties and which properties to look into.
This profiling certainly helps our sellers a lot too. Home owners and agents often complain about mis-matching requirements which do not end up in transactions. This is a problem that often plagues classified portals. We share a social profile of the client along with the contact information to the sellers when the users show interest in a property, thus helping the seller focus on the right clients and improve the probability of conversion.
We are not stopping here.
With Rental Profiling, it is helping us to predict user decisions. We all are slaves to confirmation bias. We all have a tendency to look for information which supports our decisions. Integrating the wisdom of the crowd information in the product experience improves the trust of the users in the platform as well as in the recommendations. Imagine a possibility where you get to see the properties liked by your colleagues. Another angle we are working on is Social urgency. What if you get to know how many people just like you are currently looking for properties in the same locality ?
Across the world, the real estate classifieds have been trying to move closer to the transaction side which is where the core value lies.
Makaan.com has always differentiated itself from the rest of the players in the real estate classifieds market with its unique value proposition. We always strive to make the home search journey joyful for our users. We keep on asking ourselves how effectively are we solving the most basic problem helping our users find their dream home?
Stay tuned for more updates.
Originally published at proptechview.com.