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REFERENCING.
HOUSING.COM: CASE ANALYSIS
DOCUMENT
Group #
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Overview:
“Home is a place your feet may leave but your heart will always be”. Housing is one of the basic
necessities of life and getting an affordable, tasteful, and customised house is a dream of every
man alive. As a developing country, which ranks second in the world in terms of population,
housing in India has been a problem at large in the society. Despite the value of the market, there
was a lot of inefficiencies in the market dynamics and as per Jones LaSalle’s global estate
transparency index, India was ranked as one of the lowest in the real estate transaction process
transparency. This was a major hindrance as the lack of transparency created an information
asymmetry between different market participants in the residential real estate market in India at
the time. Both buyers and sellers relied heavily on brokers, who leveraged their access to market
information to drive up costs to their own advantage. This provided fertile ground for serious
market distortions with a lot of value being lost to brokers who played the intermediation role
between sellers and buyers in the market. Further, the scope of the stock in the brokers inventory
was also limited and often in silos corresponding to individual brokers. Buyers could only access
one broker’s inventory at a time and could not benefit from a better knowledge of what was
available in the market. There was no single place or source of information on property value
and brokers were lacking professionalism on scheduling house visits and charging unfair
commissions. Due to this information asymmetry, inefficiency, lack of transparency and
extensive reliance on brokers, customers had worst experiences in the process. However, the
increasing uptake of the internet by users in India opened opportunities for leveraging
communication technology for business purposes.
As internet and technological advancements came into play, many online platforms came into
being to help people get their desired home for renting, buying, and selling. And by 2014, real
estate in India became one of the fastest growing markets in the world and the residential
housing segment being a significant component of that growth (Deepa Ray, Nitin Sangwan,
2015) and it was forecasted by IBEF that, by 2020 Indian real estate industry would hit US$ 180
billion. 99acres.com, magicbricks.com, indiaproperty.com all emerged, in 2005, 2006, 2006
respectively, to target this untapped market at the time due to the successful embracement of ICT
and improved internet access. 99acres.com was one of the first enterprises to explore this open
market in India by launching Naukri.com, a job portal and later they expanded to real estate
business and in 8years they had about 2.5 million property listing. This success story inspired
many competitors to join the field and as a result, magicbricks.com and Indiaproperty.com were
launched the next year by Times business solutions Ltd. And India property online Pvt. Ltd.
respectively. Unfortunately, even after the emergence of these online property websites with free
property search process, the main challenges faced by the potential buyers remained unsolved as
the dependency on brokers were still untethered, authenticity of the listings were never
confirmed and the listed properties provided vague location details with no street level details,
property features were scanty, as pictures were not available, and all of this weakened the
decision-making ability of potential buyers. In effect, they were all merely an online version of
the existing house search industry and by 2010, the market was almost saturated as all the
companies provided almost identical services to clients and the companies defined their success
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based on their website traffic ratings and amount of property listing instead of actual customer
feedback and this opened the market for an innovative disruption.
Housing.com identified the gap, recognized the opportunity, and distinguished themselves from
the crowd by creating a completely improved customer experience as the existing players didn’t
solve the actual challenges faced by potential clients. Their data driven innovation approach,
redefined the market and rattled the whole Indian rental industry by breaking the norm followed
for many decades. The main strength of the organisation, in our view, is that they knew exactly
what was absent in the market which made customers feel disappointed and powerless and were
able to concentrate on these aspects, others ignored.
Mr. Randy Pausch’s quote, “Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted.
And experience is often the most valuable thing you have to offer.” was so true in the case of
housing.com. It is evident that dissatisfaction and frustration is what lead to the materialisation of
Housing.com, as the co-founders, Mr. Rahul Yadav and Mr. Advitya Sharma had personally
experienced the inadequacy of the existing housing search system. They inferred that, the current
system had a lot of flaws including the unrealistic dependency on multiple property brokers
which lead to the waste of money, time, and effort of customers, which in turn adds up to
customer dissatisfaction. The information available was also not always authentic or detailed
which caused customer exploitation and sense of helplessness. Unlike many others, they saw a
portal into the online rental industry and believed that by creating unique, data driven business
model, they can beat the existing competitors and give people like themselves an opportunity for
transparent property search. They proved the proverb correct, “Necessity is the mother of
invention” and in our perspective, the best decisions are made from exposure to actual
experience and analysing potential the audience’s point of view and that is exactly what they did.
Their strategy was very simple: give people what they want in a better package with authenticity
and ease of use. They created a bi-annual/ annual subscription revenue model where the
landlords, agents, landowners can buy space on their site and visibility was solely based on the
type of subscription. Thus, in the year 2012, housing.com was launched and promised a hassle-
free housing search process and as proof of their success, they caught up to the existing market
competitors in just 2 years and even expanded their sector with full fledged data collection and
sales teams across 11 major Indian cities. Their growth was remarkable as the employee count
grew to 1500 in more than 45 cities and the site had a unique daily traffic of 100,000 visitors.
The role of innovation in product and process helped them disrupt the disorganized Indian real
estate market and gave the existing competitors a run for their money.
In 2014, the co-founder, Sharma commented that, “Housing.com will launch a new product that
facilitates online buying of houses and start a new service called rent agreement generator, as the
verbal agreements between landlord and tenant have no legal backing” (Samidha sharma, 2012).
As promised, they launched the rental agreement services later so that the customers can
approach any legal authority to claim relief in case of any breach of the contract
(https://housing.com/edge/rent-agreement). This indeed shows that, they not only had an
incredible expansion plan but also the correct methodologies to execute them as well.
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SWOT Analysis:
The SWOT analysis on housing.com revealed the factors that contributed to the company’s
strengths, which lead to the new opportunities and to analyze on how to overcome the weakness
and threats presented. (https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/4245-swot-analysis.html). The
company had impressive qualities that can be considered as their strengths and the jewel on the
crown is their data driven and fast-paced innovative approach. As the proverb goes, “the devil
lies in the details”, unlike the competitors, housing.com team focused on the minute customer
requirements which was ignored or thought irrelevant by other firms. They were all about
innovation, risk taking and providing unique customer experience and finally came up with the
‘experience the property’ mode rather than ‘view the listing’ mode. This was the feature than
differentiated them from others in the market. They aimed at providing clients with the ultimate
experience by providing accurate location, details of the amenities and neighbourhood along
with actual pictures of every nook and corner of the property listed. The users were able to
search for properties based on area and around 3000m radius of the place and could edit the
search in a single mouse click. Instead of relying on mediators, they hired a team to personally
go to the listed properties for collecting the required data so that the system became intuitive,
accurate, verified, transparent and finally simple to use. As part of the data-driven and fast-paced
innovative approach, they eliminated all the existing problems in the field by the introduction of
an algorithm-based approach to optimize the team’s paths for better efficiency, use of a demand-
supply tool to go public with the actual supply/demand of properties for various geographical
areas and development of its own mathematical model to update the listing expiry based on
demand, supply and leads for their every listed property. One of the other strengths at play here
is their fast expansion plan and its successful execution like the introduction of rental agreement
generator. The company has an excellent technical backbone as their data science lab comprises
of 40 techies in an innovation hub that boasts of ground-breaking technology in the realty e-
broking space. From rating properties on parameters such as child-friendly index to lifestyle
needs, or its virtual reality tours, Housing.com offered the best. Its team of 500 data collectors
across 55 cities has solved the problem of fake or unverified properties. It collects data on a 100-
point index to ensure the customers get every detail that could influence their home-buying
decision (Taslima Khan, 2015).
Every enterprise has its weakness and the main one identified for housing.com was the high
operational cost and this is a big threat and may invite competitors. As they hired employees for
their services, the training cost was massive as well and if the employee retaining process was not
proper, they may have lost a good amount of money and time on investing more and more on
training their people. Even though their revenue model was good, it didn’t satisfy every type of
clients as the subscription model was not a great deal for people who were looking for a one-time
deal. For example, the model is not useful to a person who just want to sell his current house for
personal reasons and is not in the real estate business. This will discourage such clientele’s
participation as they will not be interested in spending money for a subscription that they may
never use again. Some of the new potential users may not be equipped enough to afford the
subscription offered by the company and this may have prevented a group of newcomers in the
industry. Another thing about this transparent business model is that there is a high possibility of
4|Page

duplication, or worse, the emergence of a better updated model than the available one as there are
no intellectual property rights in this market.
Housing.com’s innovative attitude presented a lot of opportunities to the company as they proved
to be a huge success in just small period of time. They were able to attract a lot of investors,
including Nexus Venture partners, Softbank group and Elara Technologies, to provide them with
the funding they require and currently they have 16 investors. Research shows that, housing.com
has raised a total of over US$147.8 million in over 8 rounds and the latest one was in February
2020. Along with securing funding from the investors, it is always a great idea to start partnerships
with potential and relevant firms and even acquiring firms. Housing.com saw this opportunity and
have been acquiring many organizations, Plat, BigBHK, HomeBuy360, RealtyBI and Indian Real
estate forum, and currently they have acquired over 5 organizations which indicates their
competency, financial stability, business expansion plan and confidence in their operational,
management, growth and relationship skills.( https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/housing-
co-in/company_financials). As the market is still in fragmented state, there is always room for
further growth and even though new players may come into the industry, they will always have
the upper hand if they are willing to update their business process model and strategies at the right
time, based on the market trends at the given point of time and adding more search criteria and
filtering options to include features like public transportation, expected traffic, average weather
conditions, water availability in the area etc. can always help them retain the existing clients and
even obtain new ones. There is always the option to dream big and expand into other sectors in the
real estate market like housing property development, office space rentals or buying/selling of
plots and eventually go global. As they have the backup of algorithms and mathematical models,
they can always reuse it for setting foot into newer markets like job search or dating/matrimonial
sites. There is a scope for providing more unique follow-up services like collaborating with local
construction/design firms or labourers for providing the clients with option to customise the house
they rented/purchased via housing.com and this will definitely boost their business and these
partnerships can be used for collecting data for their future endeavours in the construction market.
Like every industry, there are a lot of threats for housing.com in the housing rental market that
needs to be dealt with to reduce any impact they may have on the business. Housing.com found
their place in the industry quickly even though there were many existing established competitors
in the market at the time of their market entry and similarly, there is always a possibility of new
competitors arising in the industry who can exploit the positive and negative experiences and
strategies housing.com have encountered and create a better business model to outcompete the
firm. Other than this threat, resurrection of existing Indian organizations like 99acres.com,
Magicbricks.com, Indiaproperty.com or the international platforms like Trulia, Zillow, Zoopla or
Rightmove can pose as a danger, if they adapt their strategies to match or outmatch the uniqueness
housing.com offers. As housing.com is an online platform, they rely heavily on internet availability
and the technology adopted by the consumers, and this can become a threat if competitors come
up with alternatives that can be considered universal and can work offline as well. In my
perspective, the current subscription model used by the company can be considered as a weakness
that can risk the sustainability of the enterprise, as others can easily come up with a better revenue
model that provides the users with an option to make progressive payments instead of bi-annual
5|Page

or annual subscription. The exponential growth and success have resulted in adopting fast paced
expansion methodologies in the company and in my opinion, this may not always be the best
option, as a wrong move can cause them to fall from the great heights they achieved. The
weaknesses identified, especially the huge operational cost, must be addressed as soon as possible
as they can endanger the whole existence of the firm.

Decision criteria for success:

Success of housing.com can be measured based on a lot of decision criteria. Firstly, providing
low-cost subscription options for customers like a progressive payment plan can be a defining
factor for success. Secondly, an option for affordable, low-cost housing can do wonders as this is
essential all over the world and presents a lucrative opportunity to the company (Woetzel, J.,
Mischke, J. & Ram, S. 2014). As one of the main issues faced by the company, reducing the
operational cost is a main criterion that needs to be tackled immediately by collaborating with
locals and outsourcing instead of hiring employees and this may reduce the spending pattern of
the firm as transportation expenses, employee training cost and scheduling can be controlled. Last
point in my array of criteria, is exploring new synergies with house sharing sector like Airbnb,
Vrbo or booking.com. There are a lot of constraints to be considered as well, like the velocity at
which competitors will adopt data driven approaches to their own customer engagement
interfaces that may reduce the competitive advantage of Housing.com’s current differentiation.
Employee retainment is another factor to be given importance as the loss of key people resources
to competitors is a real risk as the company must have spend a lot of time, money, and effort in
recruiting and training the resources.

Alternatives:
The best way to tackle issues in a business is to identify the actual problems and find alternatives
that can be used as solutions. Jon Oringer quoted, ‘Business is a string of seemingly impossible
problems looking for solutions. Each problem you solve creates a new barrier to entry for your
next competitor’(https://www.quotemaster.org/q8ae3bc51d8a51c217f9bba2007b8d8ee). There
are many alternatives that can be used by the housing.com to improve their business and
eliminate the weaknesses and threats posed by various factors. Based on the assessment, the
three main alternatives that can be proposed are: Innovation around the current customer value,
affordable housing option and Pursuing synergies to widen the scope of the current value
proposition.
I. Innovation around the current customer value proposition
Housing.com can opt to accelerate innovation around the current market offering which can be
achieved in various forms. The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic already opened opportunities for
new innovative ideas in the real estate industry such as virtual tours of properties where client
meetings take place over Google Meet and Zoom, and physical site visits were replaced by
virtual tours, video walk-throughs or drone shoots. Many companies that had not shot such
videos in the pre-pandemic days, got the shoots done hurriedly, to cater to consumer demand.
This will reduce the burden of customers travelling to the location during these restricted times.
Another form of innovation could be the outsourcing of certain resources such as data collection
6|Page

specialists. Instead of hiring more employees in certain locations and making them travel all over
the state to perform data collection operation, housing.com should create a service contract with
local freelance data collection specialists. This will bring down operational costs which is
currently one of the huge drawbacks in their business model.
Yet another avenue for innovation would be the pricing design of the current subscription model
which does not provide monthly or one-off transaction options. For example, a customer who
wishes to sell his own house would not be interested in paying for bi-annual or annual
subscription which is highly expensive since he/she wants to sell only one property. A possible
solution would be to design a new subscription model where users can be offered progressive
payments at different stages of purchase, monthly subscription, or one-off transaction along with
the bi-annual and annual model.
II. Affordable Housing
One of the most intractable social economic challenges globally is the question of affordable
housing. One of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (goal number 11) is to make cities
inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable. (UN, 2015). It is estimated that 1.6 billion people
worldwide or one third of the whole urban population will have inadequate housing or will be
paying too much of their incomes for housing by 2025. Four key levers are proposed for the
delivery of affordable housing – finding land at the right cost, reducing operation and
management costs, more efficient construction, and improved access to financing for home
buyers and home builders. (Woetzel, J. Mischke, J & Ram, S, 2014). Housing.com is well placed
to build the necessary linkages with home builders and financiers to deliver these levers. For
example, it is common that people planning to buy a property in India rely on mortgages from
banks. Housing.com could provide additional support to customers by creating a business
contract with certain banks/financial contractors who can provide loans with low interest rates in
regions where most properties are sold and connecting the customers with bankers based on the
customer’s data such as their monthly/yearly disposable income, other mortgages, or collateral
loans in their name. This process will reduce the buyer’s burden of having to check with
individual banks separately and will also shift their interest towards housing.com while
purchasing the property.
One of the analyses conducted to determine the buying behavior in residential property
purchases supports the claim that the availability of mortgage finance plays a huge role in
purchasing a house for the clients. By performing statistical analysis and calculating mean &
stanadard deviation on the survey data collected from 220 consumers, researchers confirm that
loan availability is the second most important factor after price-range in residential purchase and
in fact the mean/deviation difference between these two factors is almost insignificant which
means that the availability of loan plays is of almost equal importance to the price range in
buyer’s mind. (Kumar & Khandelwal, 2018, para 10). In the process, it would expand its market
drastically as it is now still limited to customers who can afford the housing they are searching
for. It can become much more than a search facilitator and become a facilitator for housing
solutions for many people. That would greatly improve its customer augmentation.
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III. Pursuing synergies to widen the scope of the current value proposition
Airbnb is the leading global player in the home sharing market. It created it in the first place. The
basic business model is that travelers pay a discounted rate to stay in the homes of local hosts in
the cities where they travel to. This works for both homeowners who can let out excess capacity
for a return and the buyers who get more personalized experiences at cheaper rates than
traditional hotels can offer. Airbnb provides a platform for matching homeowners and potential
tenants and charges a fee for the intermediation. An indication of the potential of this market is
that Airbnb, valued at $30 billion in 2016, is more valuable than most of the leading hotel chains
in the world. (Dillon, 2016). Many companies do not understand that customers don’t just buy
products and services, but “hire” them to do a job. This idea was developed by Clayton
Christensen as part of his work on disruptive innovation. Airbnb simply understands the
customers for temporary residence in cities better than traditional hotels. (Dillon, 2016).
Housing.com can tap into this revenue stream by creatively using their connections and the data
they already have in their business to provide homeowners with the possibility of hiring out their
unoccupied homes to short term tenants under the agreement.
Another way in which Housing.com can extend the scope of its market offering is through the
provision of renovation services to the sold properties that are required by their new owners. This
can be done by connecting with local painters, cleaners and workers and providing these services
with various package options which will make it easy for the customers to avail these services
directly from them rather than spending the money separately. Furthermore, housing.com should
offer packages in which they can assist clients with documentation work during asset registration
at the government office as it is usually a time-consuming process in India. By delivering these
additional services, housing.com could earn more revenue than usual. Then they could render
offers more often using the ancillary income that they earn by providing the above-mentioned
services which will incline the public’s view towards housing.com while planning to purchase a
property and improve customer satisfaction.

Screened alternatives:
I. Innovation around the current customer value proposition
The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has depleted multiple businesses due to quarantine constraints
all over the world. In India, the second wave was extremely hideous after which multiple
restrictions have been implemented. Businesses that function based on physical capital have
faced the drastic loss and most of them have turned towards the online facilities available, to be
specific, in e-commerce. Keeping these factors in mind, it would be better for housing.com to
provide virtual tours or video walk-throughs via various apps to their customers who are willing
to buy or rent the property which would increase the number of clients visiting the vacant house
and in turn the probability of the property being sold is high. But the issue here is that
housing.com should purchase the applications that provide these online virtual service options
such as iStaging, Tour wizard, Zoom, etc as most of them do not provide free service and this
will be another expense for housing.com. According to National association of realtors in the
US, nearly 48% of the realtor firms are facing challenges in keeping up with technology. Also,
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considering the case study happened around 2014-2015 and the pandemic started in 2020 in
India, this alternative might not provide more profit as expected. Because, in 2015, most people
still preferred direct visits after going through the pictures.
Reducing operational costs would directly influence the revenue boost for any business and
housing.com is no exception. Using more employees for their data collection process hugely
increases the budget in terms of their transportation, hectic scheduling, and other miscellaneous
expenses. Instead of recruiting as many employees as needed for this process, housing.com can
hire local freelancers who are data collection specialists and create a bilateral agreement with
them. Freelancers, or independent contractors, are part of the overall trend towards flexible
employment forms that is prevalent in all modern and industrialized countries. (Guest, 2004)
This way, the company can reduce all the expenses mentioned above along with the monthly
salary expenses. This is highly useful during the times when there is no property to collect data.
For instance, consider a scenario where there is no property to collect data for a week and the
company is working on already available houses, paying salary for data collection team for that
one week would be a waste of money. Rather, we can recruit freelancers during requirement for
data collection and this will reduce the expenses to a certain extent. Now the only issue with this
alternative is that, if housing.com is recruiting freelancers for data collection, they would need to
provide necessary training every time they recruit new people. Though the specialist freelancers
do not need training from basics, they still need to be instructed about the housing.com portal,
the data that usually the company collects in any property and how to import that data into the
portal or share it with the application/UI team. Also, another scenario is that higher income of
freelancers and the fear of being replaced by freelancers may pollute the internal team climate of
the regular employees. To avoid this, the company should assign one or few internal workers
with the freelancer, thereby maintaining the positive team environment.
Generally, businesses that provide subscription models for their clients are booming in their
respective area and housing.com is already providing bi-annual and annual subscription models
to their customers. But “what if there is a customer who needs to sell his/her only house?”,
“Would he/she be interested in subscribing to a bi-annual plan?” These are the questions that
housing.com needs to think about. In this case, the client will not pay for a subscription because
there is no need to spend that huge amount of money for a one-time deal. If any other realtor firm
offers a monthly subscription plan or even a one-off transaction, definitely the customers will
move on to them instead. Hence, it would be fantastic if housing.com could implement a
monthly model, or even better, one-time transactions in which users pay a one-time fee and sell
only one property. This would increase the number of customers/property listings and eventually
generate better revenue for the firm. Only concern here is that there is a possibility that some
brokers might use this option to their advantage.
II. Affordable Housing
Before the pandemic hit, almost 30% of the urban population in India was living on rent and
looking for affordable houses. Another stat says that nearly 79% of India’s taxpayers are middle
class income holders. Most of these people are living on rent just because they couldn’t find an
affordable house to buy and because there is insufficient housing issue globally. Many schemes
9|Page

have been introduced by the government of India such as housing for all mission (2015), Pradhan
mantri awas yojana (2015), Special window for affordable and mid-income housing investment
(2019), etc. for the development of middle-class people and providing as many affordable
housing units as possible to the people. But still, there are many people looking for houses within
their budget in the housing market and not everyone can afford it due to income inequality.
Housing.com can lend its support in providing affordable houses to its customers in various
ways. For instance, most people in India depend on home loan and Housing.com should
collaborate with multiple banks and provide their customers with home loan assistance with a
lower interest rate than the usual market rate. This will reduce the customer’s burden of working
with banks for a loan and attract them towards housing.com while planning to buy a house. This
will eventually turn more customers loyal, meaning that they will love to do repeated business
with housing.com and suggest the firm to their acquaintances as well. (Bowen et al., 2015).
Along with this, if possible, housing.com can try financing from their ancillary revenue to few
customers who are not eligible for bank loan. They could get necessary details from the
purchaser and provide them with a certain percentage of payment, if not full. They could get the
money back in the form of monthly instalments (EMI) from the client. In order to do this,
housing.com should provide some additional services to their usual customers to earn more profit
and use that additional income to offer loans to its required buyers which might be a daunting
task.
III. Pursuing synergies to widen the scope of the current value proposition
Pursuing synergies is one of the best ways to increase the growth of sales and revenue. One of
the real-time prime examples of the same is Airbnb, which is one of the leading global players in
the current home-sharing market. Their basic business model is that travelers who can afford
only little fund can stay in the homes of local hosts who are ready to accommodate outsiders for
a charge instead of paying huge amount for a hotel room. By this way, travelers can learn about
the culture of the place they are visiting and decrease the amount of money spent on their entire
trip and this unique approach offered by Airbnb has made it climb the success ladder in just a
few years since its launch. Housing.com can try to administer this method which will shift the
new set of audience (travelers) eyes towards housing.com and this will increase their yearly
ancillary revenue along with their usual buying and selling profits.
Generally, in India, once the property has been decided to be purchased, the next and most
important step is assigning the asset in the buyer’s name in all government documents related to
the property. This process is usually done in registration offices respective to the property
location which is always time consuming and sometimes confusing for new buyers.
Housing.com can assist them with the documentation part for those new purchasers for a small
amount. By this way, the customer would feel relieved of the documentation issue and
housing.com would be able to earn some revenue through this method. Along with this,
housing.com should have legal service agreement with the local painters, cleaners, construction
workers and concierge service providers who can be used by housing.com when the client needs
them. Consider a situation where a person buys a house in a new location and needs aid in
repainting the property or renovating the house according to vastu-compliance, which is
10 | P a g e

preferred in the Indian community. If it is a new locality for the buyer, they would find it
difficult to get required agents to perform these activities without help and that’s where
housing.com should pitch in. These value-added services would benefit the company because
most buyers would opt for a complete package, which is more profitable and less time-
consuming from their perspective, and housing.com would experience annual revenue growth.
Additionally, when customers vacate from their old place, the organization can avail them
service like packaging their stuffs and moving from their source to destination. The problem that
housing.com might face in this alternative is that, firstly it would need to create contract with the
multiple service providers in various locations which will be extremely time-consuming, and it is
hard to identify the labors in all the areas. After finding the labors, it will take lot of effort to
confirm their credibility. Moreover, if many buyers/sellers decide not to use these services from
housing.com, that would create a loss in their annual revenue, though not huge. This completely
depends on the consumers requirement, and it is difficult the predict the same on a long run.

Recommendation:
There is always an ever-present threat of failure in any business costing due to limitations in
financial resources and competitive aggression in the market. Hence there is a necessity for
entrepreneurs to decide “what is right” based on their own judgement (Robinson, 2007). After
carefully analyzing all the alternatives under multiple scenarios and constraints, we recommend
affordable housing as the essential alternative that should be implemented right away by
housing.com to increase its customers and eventually, its revenue. Typically, there are multiple
factors that influence the people in purchasing the property. There are many Indians who dream
of owning a house but cannot afford it because the value of any property usually increases over
time whereas the salary range in India does not increase more often and there is always a huge
gap between the salary range and property value for low-income and moderate-income people
who are more prevalent in India.
If housing.com could connect with certain banks and private financing agencies by creating a
service agreement with them, both the parties would benefit from the agreement. From the
consumer’s perspective, if they could get a home loan and if they could buy a property with no
or little down payment, they would usually opt to purchase the house as there are multiple
benefits in owning a house. Firstly, instead of paying the rent every month, they would be
willing to pay the loan’s monthly installment and this way, they would have their own house at
the end with no issue. Secondly, homeowners in India who are paying loan EMI can use it to get
tax benefits by showing their mortgage payments during the tax return application. Thirdly, as
already explained, property rates usually increase over time. So, if someone buys a house now
and sells it after few years, it will provide them with more profit.

Implementation plan:
As we have decided on the final alternative that can be adopted by housing.com, we have come
up with the implementation plan for the same. To provide home loan assistance to any customer,
housing.com should be aware of their financial situation and confirm the credibility of the
customer. Firstly, housing.com should advertise everywhere through television, newspapers, and
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billboards that they will be providing loan assistance for eligible clients. When any buyer opens
the portal, the header should reflect this advertisement in bold letters, thereby instilling the idea
into the client’s mind. The homepage should include a small "yes or no" question in one corner
in dark color inquiring whether they need a home loan to purchase a property. If selected as "no",
then the usual process should proceed where the clients will start checking the listings. But if
selected as "Yes", then the next set of questionnaires should pop-out with few important
financial questions such as their monthly/yearly net salary, the budget they have in mind and
their remaining debts with yes or no questions such as whether they have any other loans
ongoing currently, any credit card debt ongoing, etc. If selected as "no", then a calculator should
provide the approximate amount that the customer is eligible to be funded which is calculated
based on their net salary and no debts. If the debt question is selected as "Yes", then the amount
of debt can be asked as an optional question. If the user is ready to provide the details, then the
calculation can be done based on their salary and debts. If the user is not ready to provide it, the
calculation cannot be done and hence the user can be asked whether they would like a call from
the lending party directly to discuss whether they are eligible.
After the calculations are done, the UI should reflect certain amount for which the client is
eligible, along with all the bank and private finance company names who are willing to provide
the loan with their respective interest rates. Customers would be happy to know that there are
multiple options available to them for obtaining a loan. Then customers should be offered the
option to select a minimum of one to a maximum of three to four lenders with whom they would
like to discuss the terms and conditions of the loan. Once they select it, they should be notified
that the respective banks will contact them at a given time. After that, the listings should open as
usual for their viewing. Now, since the customer will have a clear picture of how much they can
get as a loan and their actual budget, they will start looking for properties that are within their
reach in terms of cost.
When this feature is introduced in the market by housing.com, there will definitely be a huge
demand from consumers to purchase the assets. Considering the number of consumers who will
use this option, housing.com should invest certain amount of money in amending the design of
their UI as per the explanation above. This will eventually end up yielding more profit and hence
the proportion of expense in designing compared to the profit they would secure would be
negligible.
In 2016, at the 2nd Estrade Real Estate Awards powered by Housing.com hosted at the Grand
Copthrone, Singapore, Jason Kothari, CEO, Housing.com said, "The Real Estate sector is
projected to grow 14% year-on year basis and grow to US$ 850 billion by 2028, accounting for
about 13% of the GDP. Economic growth is projected to be 8 percent over the next 10 years, the
highest in the world. Urbanization is expected to grow from 32% to 50% by 2050, this means
that around 400 million people will be moving to urban areas" (NBM & CW, 2016). In our
viewpoint, this confidence and attitude is one of the main reasons for the success and
sustainability of housing.com in the already established market of real estate.
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