5 ways in which indian resal estate needs to change

by Aditya Bajaj Founder and CTO

I at the CTO and Site architect of pickahome.com I have been working with this Gurgaon awesome based startup since day one. I helped them visualize and execute site design , content generation and user experience strategies . I met Vivek during a home deal my family was making we wanted to sell a second house we had in Gurgaon and vivek made the deal for us.

This was my first time selling a property and the pickahome team came across as very professional and very clean. They were with us from start to end they helped us recover important documents from the builders office. They stood by in the court when they helped us count the cash part and did their job very professionally. At that time I though all deals happen like this and it's a very clean process

"but I was so wrong"

A few months after that purchase we had to re invest the capital from the house back into the market so my parents decided to purchase another house. We used a different agent who was representing an NRI seller. We came to a price decision with the agent and did not meet the seller even after we agreed. A meeting was set for us to pay the money. I though the seller will come then but he did not instead only the agent who I hardly knew came . He hardly counted the cash and moved in a hurry he took a large chunk of cash and told us that he will meet us directly at the court. My father was in charge of the deal so I did not intervene, I was just thinking "WTF is going on ". We moved to the court and finally met the seller an NRI who was also nice guy who I think was getting conned by the agents as well.

Also there is a strict govt law about paying NRI's for property you have to pay 30% TDS and then give them only 70% of the amount. They need to claim the rest back. The second Agent who I was dealing with forgot to tell me about this. Luckily I called my manger from pickahome and he told me about this.

After this experience I was so unhappy about my real estate experience that went back to Vivek and told him that I want to create a portal for him that will change this experience. I told him to build a website with an experience. An experience that is spam free and hassle free. An experience with buyers and sellers can meet and finalize between themselves and sellers don't keep getting called 100 times a day from agents who have already called before and that is what we have founded pickahome on. The idea to change and clean the Indian real estate experience.

In pickahome we are trying to assign a manager to every customer the manager is based on the localities that the customer is interested in . We have split localities and builder projects separately and given as much many details as possible . We have also created some virtual tours which you can see on DLF park place and iro grand arch pages.

We now have focus toward core builder projects by DLF and IREO but also want to focus towards a better search experience in DLF phase 1 to 5