100Floors – Real Estate Marketplace
100Floors is a real estate portal from Suksh Technologies (has raised $1.5mn seed round), Bangalore based startup.
The portal is a marketplace for all things real estate and is trying to create a marketplace by involving agents (unlike other portals who try to shortcircuit the broker channel), property experts and of course, users who are at the core of the marketplace.
Bangalore Map - 100Floors
Sellers/Landlords can post property info (first 10 listings are free) and Buyers/Renters can post property requirements (free)- using various channels (SMS/phone/web) and 100Floors connect the buyer and seller.
The portal, being a marketplace is dependent a lot on UGC – and in order to grow the user contribution, 100Floors is providing useful content in collaboration with content companies (check out the legal section).
100Floors also provides offline services like property valuation, legal documentation drafting etc – which is ofcourse, a bigger market (especially if you target the NRI segment).
One of the USP of 100Floors is maps integration – one can search/browse via maps (an experience limited to broadband users) – the map section details out property’s location – though a lot needs to be achieved there (for example, hospitals/schools/parks near localities).
The product is in beta (has some jagged edges) and is available in 15 cities.Do give 100Floors a try and share your opinion.
The challenge with real estate portals is that no matter what they do, they don’t want to cut the broker channel – so essentially, their USP is information aggregation.
But is this information aggregation that big a USP to create differentiation (vis-a-vis offline agents)?
What’s your opinion?
Also see: EasySquareFeet
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About the author - Ashish Sinha is a Startup Mentor/Product Strategy Coach, and the founder/chief editor of pluGGd.in.
He has launched/managed couple of products (consumer as well as enterprise) in US and India, and now consults with startups/small businesses on their product/media strategy. He can be reached at: ashish (at) pluGGd.in [+91 98452 06443]
I have seen this website earlier and it sounds really interesting to me. I’ve specially noticed that websites like 99acres and all have a lot of duplicate listings as well as lot of junk (non-existent) properties listed. If somehow this issue s taken care of, then real value can be added. Another interesting think that they can do is to creates some area wise trends data based on the listings that they get on the website.
seems like a me too effort in a market crowded by giants… Value proposition isn’t strong enough….
I just tried this out. While the concept is good. I feel they have spent more focus on getting ads and other biz deals than actually dealing with product usability. Some case in points:
1. several agents are listed as individuals. This adulterates the categorization.
2. There is a lot of redundancy in local neighbourhood list for a given city. E.g. There is Airport Road & AirportRoad and airport road.
3. Maps integration is pretty useless. For a given property the map seems to indicate the location of the property while actually it is indicating the location of the neighbourhood of the property.
I suggest they make the site more usable for all target customers before focusing on biz deals and ad revenues.
@Chintan, Very true! Infact, the focus is purely on making money..rather than user experience..
infact, overall UI is quite buggy..and somehow I was able to see other user’s internet mail id as well..so its open for spam.
Persquarefeet under Sulekha’s leadership is the best real estate portal in India. I don’t think 100floors has a chance with Sulekha pioneering the real estate business in the world
From whom have they raised this $1.5m?
@Sandeep, PerSquareFeet is not under Sulekha’s leadership. From where did you get this info? Or are you talking about some other portal?
Ashish, Well I do think that information aggregation is a problem and a good problem to be solving especially in a space like real estate in India where data is not openly available and in the offline reference which you made, brokers hardly share their data with other brokers hence leading to a limitation in choice especially in the rental segment. Key to success could be an online and offline strategy which looks like 100floors is getting at, though quite far away from it in the near future. Found maps to be quite useful especially in terms of visualizing the area around.
@persqaurefeet Thanks for your interest in 100floors. Quality of data on our site is a very critical performance indicator for us and we strive to keep the bar high on this. Real estate related stats and trends are something which is not available currently and we realize it would add a lot of value and rest assured we are looking at this. Let’s have an offline conversation sometime and discuss other issues and possible alliances. I’m on vinodh@suksh.com
@Chintan We appreciate you taking the time and effort to try out 100floors.com Noted the issues that you have mentioned, we will iron these out in the days to come. Maps and data around maps are a tricky proposition (as Ashish also mentioned) especially in the India scenario of connectivity etc, so we are trying out some things currently internally to improve the experience around maps.
@Alok Getting consumers access to real data from real people is our key goal. Agree to the online and offline strategy part, in fact we are looking at several aspects around this.
I observed their alexa rank to be 95K. I dont think that the paid traffic will take them any longer. 100floors need to work on building value and not spending too much on marketing. Attempt was to make some me-too stuff. Good luck guys anyway.