IT Trends To Watch Out For In Real Estate Sector In 2014

India is undergoing a demographic transition and gaining economically from the changing age pattern. India’s youth population (15-32 years), comprising nearly 40% of the urban population, is fast becoming a new set of consumers for whom marketers are working their way up to please and delight.

With their inexhaustible and ever-increasing demand for the very best, and their disposable income literally soaring, these young people now aspire as much or even more than the ‘more established’ older generation. This is putting a compelling pressure on new-age marketers to give them nothing less than the ‘best.’

Real Estate in India has been one of the fastest growing sectors but an unregulated one, at best. Till date, it has been plagued by critical issues such as absence of standardisation, lack of adequate knowledge-sharing and more. That’s why the sector has mostly witnessed a not-so-healthy and disorderly growth.

So how could Big Data help in this context? Understanding Big Data fundamentals has now become all the more important for organisations that are aiming to automate their business processes and are capturing all client interactions. Of late, India has seen a huge surge in ERP adoption across industries and that too, in the SME segments. A Gartner report published in August 2013 states that SaaS-based ERP is going to grow by 28% CAGR in India for the next five years.

India’s real estate sector has specifically adopted and will continue to adopt the SaaS ERP route to manage end-to-end business processes, client interactions and ever-growing data. The key consultants and developers in the Indian realty space fully comprehend the requirement for ERP/CRM solutions.

Realising the large gap in this sector, organisations are bringing in a fresh wave of change by launching IT solutions for real estate consultants. Today, most of these professionals are catering to the affluent young buyers and they require organised and systematic processes to come up with the best possible offers. In a bid to introduce a professional approach in their everyday workings, innovative IT solutions providers are now helping new-age consultants in changing and resetting their business ground rules.

With the availability of ERP systems, comes the need to connect with business partners. But that could be easily taken care of as social media has already made inroads into the country in a big way. In 2014, business solutions built around social interactions will reach the SMEs without any hassle. Also, private social networking for business will become a major channel to close business deals among SMEs. Solutions likes Closemydeal.in, which caters to a specific group of SMEs (in this case, real estate consultants), will become even more prevalent.

Combining ERP/CRM and social media, social features will be embedded in internal CRM/ERP solutions as well and will become a part of any digital communication with clients/employees. E-mail communication will slowly take a backseat in favour of social media tools, which can reach out to a wider audience in an organised manner. Thus, chances of closing a deal at the earliest may soon become a reality. The year 2014 will be the year of ‘social revolution’ in the real estate space where consultants will close more deals by reaching to their professional peers and the new breed of consumers – the youth of today who aspire to be upwardly mobile and social, with ready disposable incomes.

With the telecom revolution happening fast in India, SMEs will have better access to world class data centres while Indian organisations, leveraging their local market knowledge, will be providing more innovative ERP/CRM solutions.

In a nutshell, IT will make more impact for the SMEs, mainly in the real estate space, which will attract more skilled professionals in this sector. This will further propel the delivery of services in the real estate sector.

About the author: Anupam Saha is co-founder and business head of RealtoExpress, an IT solutions provider firm catering to the real estate industry. He is an IITian with 25 years of industry exposure in India and the US.