From correspondents in Karnataka, India, 09:26 PM IST
Surf & Fish Internet Solutions a company co-headquartered in Philadelphia, US and Bangalore, India has recently launched www.nobrokerage.in. The website directly connects property owners, buyers and tenants and eliminates payment of brokerage. The website does not encourage brokers and agents to list and is a pure-play customer platform. The core idea of the website is to help users connect directly and settle property deals for a nominal cost. The listing & subscription cost is as low as Rs 10/day.
To help users list their properties, requirements and seek responses, www.nobrokerage.in has tied up with ICICI for payment gateway and has been clocking a tremendous conversion rate since inception. Besides, terms and conditions preclude any brokerage payment by either party, thereby discouraging agents to list. Gursaran, Principal Business Analyst, indicates that each e-mail/SMS response has been tagged with a system generated message "I will not pay/receive brokerage", which acts as a strong deterrent for brokers to transact. The company has partnered with SMSCountry for SMS gateway services. It is observed that serious users send on an average about 8 to 10 SMS responses per subscription to seek property of their choice.
Within the first few weeks of launch, the website has seen phenomenal success. As on today, the pan-India website has close to 1700+ listings and one of the lowest bounce rates of less than 10%. The average registration conversion at about 8.6% is one the best which the on-line real estate segment can accomplish in such a short while. In addition, the company has partnered with AdMagnet, an Ad Network company to serve Ads on its website on a total CPM basis. Besides, talks with Tyroo are also progressing for higher capacity utilization. Says, Dr Pedibhotla that, as per online consumer research, the concept has seen significant user acceptance and is a run away success and now that the waters are tested, the next step would be launching broad based internet campaigns so as to enhance awareness of the site. In this context, the company intends partnering with PerceptKnorigin, an established player in on-line marketing space.
www.nobrokerage.in is built on the robust Java, SQL platform using STRUTS, Ibatis framework and has strong back end processes to meet the demands of scale and performance. Says Das, CTO of the company, to differentiate from other on-line real estate websites and to avoid the clutter, the look and feel of the website has been deliberately kept simple to create an impression of being a serious, professional & business driven website. Response rate indicates that the reasoning seems to have resonated well with the internet users.
The venture has been funded by private equity players and NRIs based out of US. For more details see www.nobrokerage.in
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