Housing.com Seeing 60% More Traffic Than Pre-Covid

The Indian property portal Houing.com is seeing traffic levels 60% above the levels it was recording prior to the pandemic. The portal is one of a trio of companies owned and operated by Elara Technologies Group, the others being the property portal Makaan.com and the end-to-end brokerage company Proptiger, all of whose traffic has seen a sustained rise since the beginning of the year according to the group CEO Dhruv Agarwala.

Of the three Housing.com has seen the biggest rise in traffic at around 60% of pre-pandemic levels with conversion rates also seeing a positive trend. In an interview with PTI, Agarwala said:

"Housing.com has seen the maximum gains with organic traffic up by 60 per cent from the pre-COVID number. Conversion rates, from traffic to enquiries, on all our platforms are also higher than what they were in March, which suggests that prospective buyers are beginning to come back into the market to search for homes"

The portal has recently been translated into Hindi to better serve the burgeoning demand in smaller towns as more and more Indians go online in search of their next home. As Elara COO Mani Rangarajan told us in his interview with Simon Baker during Property Portal Watch 2020 APAC last week, the opportunity in the Indian market to monetise the long tail of smaller agents in smaller towns is still nascent but will grow considerably in the coming years.

Elara Technologies is backed by Softbank as well as News-Corp via its Australian portal company REA Group which plunged $70 million into Elara Technologies back in January. Despite this year’s influx of funding, Agarwala was cautious about revenue expectations given the adverse effects of the pandemic on the Indian real estate market:

“Real estate has also been severely impacted, which is likely to have an adverse impact on our original revenue forecast for this year.”