Real estate portal CommonFloor starts virtual tours for resale, renting

BENGALURU: Real estate portal CommonFloor has launched virtual tours for resale and rental property listings, seeking to provide home seekers a 360-degree view, from wall to wall and ceiling to floor, while differentiating itself. “Photographs are of the past,” said Sumit Jain, cofounder and CEO of Common-Floor. “With virtual tours of resale and rented properties, we will provide a close to reallife experience and try as far as possible to eliminate the need to go visit a property to make a decision,” he added.

The Bengaluru-based company’s rival Housing.com had in 2012 introduced the concept of verified listings as it entered the market with a clear differentiator – credible information backed by data. Housing introduced map-based search and sent its own team to visit every home it listed to collect and verify information, and click photos. But most leading portals adopted the verified listing model within a year.

CommonFloor plans to follow a hybrid model to list properties. “We have our own team of 200 employees who are mapping houses and in the next month, we will empower brokers with technology to help them list houses in the same fashion as well,” Jain said. The firm already has about 1,000 virtual tour listings live on its desktop and mobile app. In the next six months, it plans to scale up to map more than 5 lakh properties. The secondary sale and rental market is at least twice as big as the primary property market. CommonFloor makes revenue on a “per lead” basis from the broker or homeowner while the site offers free service to the end customer.

Experts are of the view that younger and digitally savvy consumers will increasingly turn to online portals owing to cost efficiency.