From 3D visual to Uber pick-up: Superise seeks to revolutionise online realty search

A slew of start-ups has revolutionised the real estate space in India in the last couple of years by with the help technology as the game-changer. One of the recent entrants is the Noida-based Superise.com, an interactive real estate portal, that is aiming to garner a sizeable share of the market with technology that it claims will change how property is searched online. The web 4.0 real estate tech company has an ambitious plan – to build a disruptive search technology, democratise information, i.e. empower buyers with real usable information that will impact decision-making.  The start-up is building a search engine that will completely automate and personalise search, says Kaushik Guhathakurta, COO. It recently launched its beta version with focus on Delhi NCR, and soon plans to expand into top-10 cities. “By personalisation, we mean allowing a user to search a property based on a custom menu and select a property based on the individual’s unique parameters – backed by our proprietary data and analytics engine. There are multiple such tools and analytics we are building which we feel will revolutionise property search,” said Guhathakurta. Some of these would allow users to view various properties in 3D – at project, tower or unit level, to compare multiple units or projects simultaneously, even across cities if required,  and give the user a chance to study the total cost breakup of any unit - including all extra charges and all taxes, payment schedule, the EMIs payable on loan if required as well as the amortisation chart of the loan. Since the launch six months ago, Guhathakurta says it has had 2,000 visitors per day and 25 percent repeat visits. “We are doing 30 transactions a month on average since our launch. We have a flat fee of 19,999 which a customer has to pay online to book a unit and an additional fee which is negotiable with our developer partners.” Superise has an exclusive tie-up with Uber for free project site visits, a document management system for customers to digitize and store all their property documents, through loan processing and insurance. Besides, it also provides the user offline support from its sales advisors for transactions till the end. It has tied up with PayUMoney, online payment aggregator which will enable its users to collect one lakh PayUMoney points on every purchase made on Superise.com Evolving tech ecosystem Superise is the utcome of an unplanned meeting of five co-founders – Aditya Parashar, Founder and CEO, Anil Kumar,  Chief Marketing Officer, Ajay Chauhan, Head of Engineering,  Partha Bardhan, Chief Technology Officer and Guhathakurta – in a business conference a year ago and a discussion that followed on the changing landscape in the real estate industry and evolving tech ecosystem.  The start-up was founded on an initial capital of Rs 1.5 cr.  It has since then raised  Rs 3.5 crore from a group of angel investors. It has signed up with 20 leading developers across NCR and Bangalore – the first 2 markets that it is targeting. It then plans to expand into top-10 cities to maximize its service delivery outreach. “Our first goal-post is to touch 100 transactions a month which we think we will be able to achieve by early next year and then grow by 50 percent on month on month basis till we touch 200-250,” says Guhathakurta. The Indian real-estate market size is expected to touch US $180 billion by 2020. The housing sector alone contributed 5-6 percent to the country’s gross domestic product. In the period FY 08-20, the market size of this sector is expected to increase to a CAGR of 11.2 percent, according to Corporate Catalyst (India) Pvt Ltd.’s report on Real Estate Sector in India.