INTRODUCTION:-
Real estate sector is one of the most globally recognized sectors. It comprises of four sub sectors - housing, retail, hospitality, and commercial. The growth of this sector is well complemented by the growth in the corporate environment and the demand for office space as well as urban and semi-urban accommodations. The construction industry ranks third among the 14 major sectors in terms of direct, indirect and induced effects in all sectors of the economy.
Real estate is an integral part of the economy of any country. On an average, it accounts for about 11% of the gross domestic profit. A US-based company that helps students in finding College Apartments & off campus housing was facing challenges in achieving sales due to stiff competition and changes in the economy. The agency owner soon realized that their old brochure-style website was a passé which needed to change in a hurry. An upgrade to help them promote new properties and break new ground was the need of the hour. The owner also wanted to offer his clients some value-added services that would help them get more takers for their properties. When they came to Exceptionaire, majority of their new leads came from referrals. Though this is a good situation to be in, however, they wanted to maximize their online presence to attract more eyeballs to their website.
As a strategy to convert more leads into clients, the owner wanted to position the company as a market leader in local property investment. He also wanted to offer assistance to his current clients to help them sell more thereby building customer loyalty so as to get them to use the agency services more.
MARKET SIZE:-
By 2040, real estate market will grow to Rs 65,000 crore (US$ 9.30 billion) from Rs 12,000 crore (US$ 1.72 billion) in 2019. Real estate sector in India is expected to reach a market size of US$ 1 trillion by 2030 from US$ 120 billion in 2017 and contribute 13% to the country’s GDP by 2025. Retail, hospitality, and commercial real estate are also growing significantly, providing the much-needed infrastructure for India's growing needs. Indian real estate increased by 19.5% CAGR from 2017 to 2028.
Office space has been driven mostly by growth in ITeS/IT, BFSI, consulting and manufacturing sectors. During 2019, the office leasing space reached 60.6 msf across eight major cities, registering a growth of 27% y-o-y. In 2019, office sector demand with commercial leasing activity reached 69.4 msf. Co-working space across top seven cities increased to reach 12 sq ft by end of 2019.
GAP ANALYSIS:-
To emerge above the competition and make a search engine optimized website.
To drive more traffic to the website from a few hundreds to tens of thousands.
To handle traffic efficiently.
Real-time social media updates triggered by any changes made by the Manager.
A mobile responsive website.
To enable users to compare between properties.
To connect agents with related properties.
To create a comprehensive marketing plan.
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION SOLUTION:-
We created a strong web presence so that the site could be easily indexed on search engines. Making their website search-engine friendly was no mean feat as each one of 200,000 property links had to be made conducive to SEO, which we did manually to ensure there were no errors.
We did on page & off page optimization to drive a sizeable traffic to the site as well as achieve top keyword ranking in major search engines. We also expanded the digital footprint by making an impactful presence across major social media.
We built a complex CMS system with a system and database architecture to ensure that the site now had the ability to handle thousands of concurrent users without any lags or glitches.
Content is king. Keeping in line with this, we had to create an eco-system such that the content from any blog is efficiently updated on all integrated social media channels like Facebook and Twitter and create as many back links as possible to the site.
With over 60% of traffic coming from the handheld, it was imperative to make the website perfectly responsive. We built the website in a way to ensure that it renders well across all devices of varying screen-sizes.
We created a logically driven User experience tool to aid users in making informed-decisions. We built a comprehensive comparison tool to enable users to compare between properties based on multiple parameters. This was done by creating a database with all pertinent property details which would be a likely point of comparison going into it in order to create an efficient comparison engine.
The initial database did not connect properties to the agents that were handling them which were quite chaotic. It was hardly possible to do this manually as we were staring at 200,000 properties. We eventually devised an algorithm to add agents corresponding to each property to the system.
We created, developed and launched a website and full marketing plan with the following:
A contact form linked to an email address created specifically for the property.
A fully interactive gallery showcasing all properties.
A traditional and interactive marketing plan created specifically to drive qualified leads back to the website.
Optimized the website for search results (SEO).
RESULT:-
After delivering the SMAC Solutions to the customer, client is getting a huge amount of traffic through search engine. The customer is getting over 45,538 hits to their website on a monthly basis and aims to reach a million users in the next year.