The real estate market long since, it has been hailed as a natural fit for the application of Artificial intelligence and machine learning models, is formulated because of its fragmented nature, filled with brokers and intermediaries watching to get in the middle of a tenant that looks to purchase or rent a house.
Clearly, in India, broker culture is so widely carried out to a point wherein brokerage now has become acknowledged as a social norm. Mentioning to refine this, Saurabh Garg, Amit Agarwal and Akhil Gupta founded ‘NoBroker.in’ back in year 2014, earlier. The site aimed at abolishing brokers from the real estate market since they do not sum any value to the real estate market. While, brokers function on selfish means and do not give the customers a perfect match for their house search, this method of broker seemed useless.
NoBroker stepped into the market aiming to introduce an AI/ML solution to the widespread broker problem specially in India. Presently, it is one of the leading data-driven real estate companies in India, with over 1 lakh properties that is being established over the past month. The website further, also introduced various AI-based products such as Rent-o-meter, livability score and transit score for sanctioning a democratic house search for customers.
Akhil Gupta stated about how NoBroker facilitates all transactions on the platform, sanctioning them to profit a huge number of leads in the process. Also according to him, it would lend a hand in building the machine learning and AI that will also be effective to provide insights to the customers. Further, demonstrating the data-first approach of the company, Akhil claimed, “One thing we made sure of is that we have all kinds of data,
we don’t lose out on any data. So we designed our system that way, we had a huge amount of data in the system.” The company earlier, began operations in Mumbai, and further expanding to multiple cities such as Bangalore, Pune and Chennai. Recently, the company headquartered itself in Bangalore.
The objective of NoBroker was to develop and formulate a platform where brokers will not be granted permission, but this was only the beginning of AI being used in the service. Reportedly, NoBroker found problems with the owner not picking up the tenants calls. Observing this, NoBroker steadily initiated a change that could fix this present issue faced by the consumers on the app.
Hence Akhil said, “We introduced something called “Call Alerts”. Now what happens is, the owner has the app, and the user has the app, and when the user calls, even when the owner doesn’t have the user’s number, there is a card that flashes up telling the owner that a user from NoBroker is calling them.”
The Rent-o-meter functions on the principle “every property is unique, and no two are the same, even if they are in the same building,” stated Gupta. He further commented “What we have done is we have around 70 attributes of the property and we have created a prediction algorithm. So what it does is, at a street-level accuracy, it predicts the rent for a property. This is a self-learning ML algorithm which will get more and more powerful as more transactions continue to happen on the platform.”
