Buying a home ain’t that easy, but the more difficult task is to track the payment schedule/builder progress etc. HomeBuy360 is a Bangalore based startup that wants to solve the process madness in real estate industry with the launch of products meant for property buyers as well as builders.
HomeBuy360 is built as a CRM tool for builders, some of the features of the product are:
- Contact Directory – Manage all contact and prospect buyer information in a single place.
- Residence Management – Manage changes to pricing, payment structure, tax rates, templates
- Booking: Define all the discounts and premiums in a central manner. Integration with leads and contact database ensures that all bookings are error free & a new experience for the buyer.
- Home Customization: Define offered customization with the attached cost and let the buyers choose,
- Bank Connect: Banks providing loan are listed with all procedural documents and available to all buyers on click of a button.
- Document Management: Create templates for various documents and generate them on click of a button with all the buyer and project information automatically merged.
- Milestone Update: Email and SMS is sent to buyer on the progress of the project.
- Collection And Payment, Issue management (via workflow), Referral tracking, Messages, Reports etc.
Essentially, a one-stop shop for builders to track projects and manage buyer relationship.
The product also enables buyers to monitor progress, view documents, check collection & dues status, track customizations and even refer the builder to their peers.
Started by ex-Infoscians, HomeBuy360 is monetized via Pay-per-use model.
Pricing models vary from pay as you sell, pay over time, per project to one time annual charge etc. We encourage builders can charge back the fees they pay us to their buyers given the value created and provided to buyers through the online login. This essentially means, builders can use the application for free by transferring our fees to the buyers.[Kshitij Minglani & ?Rajat Kothari, Co-founders of HomeBuy360].
Homefind360 – the consumer portal
In order to complete the loop, the startup has launched Homefind360, which is basically a search site for one to find real estate properties (limited to ones registered on the site).
As far as business model is concerned, HomeBuy360 doesn’t want to charge builders for the service. The whole concept is to build it like a search service (including free text search), where builders can add their property details for free and the service is monetized via ads (including Pay-per-click, pay-per-impression, pay-per-lead, pay-per-sale, banner ads etc).
Founder Kshitij also shares that they plan to sell site inventory based on query keywords, which seems like a suboptimal approach to me (real estate property search should not be equated with local search inventory). Moreover, it takes a while to build traffic to the site and so far, the site is missing some of the basic rules of SEO.
Most importantly, if homefind360 wants to be the consumer portal, they need to bring data across all the builders and not just the ones who are part of their system (i.e. be the ‘Google’ and not ‘Justdial’). This is the least, a consumer will expect from a search property.
Also, as part of the site network, a stand alone property for buyers to manage builder relationship (irrespective of whether the builder is part of H360 network or not) will add a lot of value and help the startup seed a WoM marketing for the product.
Overall, a service like this is much needed in the market and homebuy360 is an interesting startup to watch out for. In its current form, I believe they have launched too many products and would sincerely advise the team to consider bringing everything under one roof (though separate brands).
What’s your take? Do give homefind360 and homebuy360 a spin and share your opinion.
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Also see: Mumbai Based grtDeal Brings Group Buying To Real Estate Business
Aside, 100nests, a startup we profiled 2 years back has shut down its real estate business.
