SaaS to real estate agents
Would like to build something which will be one stop shop for the real estate agents/real estate marketing agencies. The idea is to let them focus on what they do best (sales) and handle everything else for them, charge commission for the service. What do you think does this has market will the agents use the service (I believe they are already using different services but all of them are disconnected) Happy to discuss it further in comment section
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IMHO, the money in this domain is in the way demand is discovered and propagated. Supply of consumers buying the residential/commercial property will always be skewed in a country like India.
Hence, if your solution helps in bringing more demand to the broker, they will consider it and you can monetise it. Else, it is just another " good to have" solution and not a " need to have".
PS: 8y of real estate experience here across functions and domains.
Directly it will not help bring in more leads as the focus is more around increasing the productivity of the agents
- It will help them just focus on sales so more time for client calls
- Will integrate training which will help them in negotiation
- They will be able to build their own digital brand (Ops, Accounting, Marketing will be taken care by us) Do you think this has market
See, I will be honest - this sounds more like a "good to have" than "need to have". I hope I'm wrong.
Out of the points you mentioned, 1 and 2 are something Brokers already do well. Sl.No. 3 relates to demand marketing and this may have a niche TG, those brokers who are early enthusiasts and those who have higher propensity to pay.
Sales is not that easy to train, and Operations is not that delinkes from Sales in most real life roles and scenarios.
If your TG is agents then they are tricky stakeholder, 95% of their coordination happens offline. CAC is too high because these days everyone in real estate does marketing builder, agents, marketing agencies. You need to pick up one problem in the entire real estate chain and build for that, niche is better approach to adopt
The focus is going to be more on tech than marketing, I would like to integrate everything in the backend which might be helpful for them to close the deal
I would talk to atleast 20 real estate agents before starting on implementing any solution. Questions I would ask
- How do you currently manage this?
- What challenges are there in current services they use?
- Would they pay money for new service?
Make sense I'm going to do that, thanks!
I had started a company in the real estate space OP. We focused on brokers for a while and had thought about this . my father is also an agent and doing decent . he is also the president of AIBF Bhopal (a nation wide association of brokers )
short answer : do not do it .
Medium long : brokers basically rely on one big deal every month and 3-4 small deals. that's it. they anywat do not get a lot of leads or crack so many deals that they would require saas. Excel , word , pen , copy , phone are enough. the only thing they want is good leads.
If you are hell bent you can target builders instead. but there are already quite a few companies doing this. my suggestion is leave real estate . Its a very big market and has a lot of inefficiency but then unless the government brings in some rules and standardisation, it will always remain fragmented and chaotic .
R square is an old company already doing this for brokers. you can check them out.
Thank you for your inputs. Have couple of other ideas as well outside of real estate would definitely consider all aspects before jumping in the ship.
Let me check R square.
According to you what's the main pain point in real estate either from demand or supply side.
I was looking at square yard I believe they have connect app but not sure how much penetration they are able to make, the agent community is huge