Real estate startups such as Commonfloor.com, NoBroker.com bet on crowdsourcing for content

NEW DELHI: Real estate startups such as Commonfloor.com, NoBroker.com and Flatmate.in are increasingly betting on crowdsourcing to source content for their portals, attracting contributors with rewards and goodies.

CommonFloor.com, for example, has introduced a 'Freelenser' initiative that allows amateur photographers to post the pictures of their locality on the property listing portal and, if selected, the photographer can work as a freelancer and would get to click another 4-5 localities with a stipend of Rs 4,000-5,000 per locality.

NoBroker.com, a peer-topeer rental mobile app, has introduced a 'click-n-earn' feature in the app that allows anybody to click and post photo of a 'to-let' board in their locality on the app.

The person would get 100 in their mobile wallet Paytm or bank account for every veri fied listing, with no upper limit on the number of list ings. Flatmate.in, a roomm ate search app based in Delhi NCR, recently started a referral scheme in which if someone refers a friend to answer its questionnaire, then the person gets company branded mugs or movie tickets free.

"Sourcing data through crowd helps in getting clarity and at times gives good insights. We wanted to create a product af ter understanding the market needs," said Sarang Jain, co founder of flatmate.in.

Crowdsourcing is a method of getting work done from people who don't actually work for the firm. This is an increasingly popular concept across the w orld, and is used either for idea generation or problem solv ing.

Akhilesh Tuteja, head of IT advisory at KPMG in India, said crowdsourcing is the cheapest way to cover wide ge ographies. "Perfect outcome is a big issue in crowdsourcing data, but if the incentives are rightly structured, the result can be good," he said.