India’s housing market has defied expectations, recording all-time high sales despite soaring prices and the highest interest rates in six years. A NAREDCO-Knight Frank report predicts the Indian real estate market could grow from $477 billion to $1 trillion by 2030 and $5.8 trillion by 2047, highlighting a trend towards homeownership, post-COVID.
However, this promising growth unveils a critical gap in the market. While numerous online portals facilitate the discovery of project listings, the subsequent stages of the home-buying journey remain predominantly offline and fraught with unpredictability. This disconnect from the digital conveniences that consumers have come to expect in all other sectors, highlights a pressing need for innovation in the real estate transaction process.
Bridging this gap is RealBetter, an innovative integrated B2B real estate platform founded by Chakrapani Gollapali and Gaurev Kapur in 2023.
Drawing from his experience in a family-run real estate consultancy, Kapur tells YourStory, “The struggle was real – finding a seller when I had a buyer, and vice versa. Existing online real estate portals fell short of addressing the everyday hurdles agents face, offering no proper solutions to these pressing challenges, resulting in unsatisfied clients.” Kapur believes that the problem of the end-users and investors can’t be solved until you solve for the problems of the middlemen.
This insight led to the creation of RealBetter, aiming to revolutionise the way agents and builders engage and transact, fostering a trusted environment, and delivering a speed of transaction that leverages design, data, and platform technology.
With its commitment to 100% verified industry users, RealBetter facilitates seamless buying and selling decisions.
Gollapali explains that Real Better’s unique matching and recommendation engine is a first for India’s B2B proptech market, providing instant, accurate matches for buyer agents’ requirements. This innovation significantly reduces time spent on shortlisting properties, enhancing decision-making efficiency.
He also highlights the impact of their builder store, another first in India. “By aggregating residential and commercial projects, we’ve created a one-stop solution for agents, enhancing their ability to serve clients effectively,” he says.
Making agents the heroes
At the core of RealBetter lies a commitment to real estate agents, who are deemed indispensable to the platform’s ethos and functionality.
Kapur says, “Agents are our heroes, integral to Real Better’s mission of empowering the real estate industry and making it digital-first. We’ve designed every aspect of our platform with them in mind, ensuring they have the tools and support to provide exceptional buying and selling experiences to their clients.”
The platform is engineered to facilitate every step of the agent’s workflow with efficiency and ease. From creating a digital profile, to posting buy/sell requirements in under 30 seconds, from getting instant matches for their listings, to getting assistance in site visits for their clients, the platform ensures an easy to use and seamless experience.
Agents benefit from instant matches, swift sharing with buyers and sellers, and access to a wide array of listings, from new launch projects by top builders to large-scale developments. The aim is to expedite decision-making to close deals—all within a single, cohesive platform.
The commitment to agents and builders extends beyond the platform’s capabilities, to its business model also, which is built on a subscription basis and a freemium model.
“Our operational metrics focus on driving accurate matches, faster responses, and deal closures, all facilitated through our unique RealBetter Concierge Service,” Gollapali explains. The subscription allows agents to potentially get 10X ROI by closing more number of transactions with the same efforts & time, significantly exceeding the value of their investment in the platform.
Data, design, and tech
The platform’s success hinges on its robust data ingestion methods, sleek listing templates, and a user-centric design philosophy. RealBetter’s approach to data and design ensures that each listing is presented in a manner that balances comprehensiveness with user engagement.
Gollapali emphasises, “Design is not just about aesthetics; it’s about functionality, about making complex decisions simpler and more intuitive.”
RealBetter addresses the need for a seamless user experience across buying, selling, and matching, with its tech stack enabling a truly omnichannel engagement. “Whether it’s through our app, website, or WhatsApp, we ensure a consistent and integrated experience for our users,” Kapur says.
“Over the last few weeks, since the launch in Gurgaon, RealBetter has provided thousands of accurate matches between buyer’s agents and seller’s agents on the platform. In most cases, each match has saved an average of four to 10 hours of time, driving productivity, efficiency and hence switching from their current offline and traditional methods to the RealBetter digital platform. This is the foundation to drive faster and better buy/sell decisions for the real estate industry,” he says.
The path ahead
Gollapali believes that at the heart of everything RealBetter does is a 10X approach – right from the scale of problem-solving to ROI for their users.
With a business model based on subscription and a commitment to delivering 10X ROI to its users, the company is poised for profitability within its second year. The platform’s ambition extends beyond financial success, aiming to bring India’s million real estate agents and builders into a unified, efficient ecosystem. India’s projection target of reaching $1 trillion real estate market cannot be achieved without the support of tech.
“Our goal is to not only achieve a $100 million revenue target but to significantly enhance the buying and selling experience in the real estate sector, and grow the size of the industry” Kapur states.
As RealBetter strides forward, its founders remain committed to leveraging technology to transform the real estate industry. “Our mission is a paradigm shift – to solve the pain of the end user’s and investor’s real estate transaction journey by first uncomplicating for agents and builders. By harnessing the potential of digital technology, we are committed to pushing the boundaries of what’s achievable through relentless innovation and flawless execution,” Gollapali concludes.
