Hyper Personalisation - The Future of Real Estate Sales

In an exclusive interaction with Jaipriya K S, Assistant Editor, Homes India, Yash Paleja, a leading real estate strategist in India, shares his valuable insights on how hyper-personalization strategies are redefining the future of real estate sales.

With over 20 years of experience in the real estate industry, Paleja has executed leadership roles with renowned companies, including Sunteck Realty, HDFC, Barclays, Citi, and Coldwell Banker. He specializes in designing and implementing effective sales strategies, training and mentoring CXOs & sales teams, and enhancing customer experience, engagement, and retention.

Personalization Everywhere, Except in Real Estate

One is used to experiencing personalization while using products or services across various industries, be it booking a cab, ordering something online, or even your favorite OTT subscription. Addressing you by your first name, sending wishes on your birthdays and anniversaries, and showing you a feed that’s apt for your mood are very common for the products we use—except for one of the most important and expensive purchases of our lives: real estate!

Why Real Estate is Slow in Technology Adoption

Real Estate has been slow in adapting to technology in property sales, and with the regulator also fairly young, there is a lot of ambiguity, lack of clarity, resistance to mind-shift, or whatever that could make tech adaptability sluggish!

The Contradictive Customer Experience

While as a Customer, even for a Rs.200 Cab ride you would be in complete control of the experience in terms of knowing the ETA, type of vehicle, driver demographics, shortest route, online payments and cherry on the cake where the driver is begging for a 5 star rating at the end of the experience; for a Rs. 2 crore real estate purchase the customer experience is not that great. In most industries, higher ticket sizes mean superior customer experience and stronger personalization, but real estate bucks this trend.

How Brokers and Developers Can Begin

While a lot can be done in real estate as far as better customer experience (CX) and deeper hyper-personalization are concerned, the question is how real estate developers and brokers can start implementing personalization, or rather hyper-personalization, in real estate sales.

Starters like implementing AI tools in lead generation, pre-sales, and sales follow-up have now become key processes in the real estate sales funnel.

Also Read: Real Estate Influencers and Experts Across India You Must Follow

Turning Digital Footprints into Buyer Intelligence

While digital lead generation can give a lot of digital footprint of the prospect, these data points need to be used ethically and effectively to address and understand the needs of the prospect, since real estate is a need-based asset — Roti, Kapda, Makaan, and Internet — remember?

In the growth phase of this sector in India, the expectations of the prospects are also rising. With rising expectations of Butter Roti, Branded Kapda, Badaa Makaan, and faster internet, the prospect is screamingly demanding hyper-personalization from the real estate seller.

The real estate buyer wants his needs to be understood, keeping in mind his ethnicity, his age group, his current day in his life cycle graph, his existing lifestyle, his limited knowledge about real estate as a product, his ambiguity related to his rights under the real estate regulation, and so on.

These are prerequisites. And most of these data points are available or can be derived from the digital footprints at a pre-sales stage of the real estate sales funnel and used effectively in the stages of the funnel, followed by implementing simple AI Tools.

Five-Point AI Intelligence Framework for Hyper-Personalization

1. Intelligence about the Prospect: Understand demographic data and psychographic data derived from the digital footprint, etc.
2. Intelligence about the Real Estate Project: Includes floor plans, unit plans, views, amenities, construction technique, construction quality, possession timelines, approved home loan banks, developer credibility, and past delivery, etc.
3. Intelligence about the MicroMarket: Such as rate per square foot in that location, absorption velocity, preferred configurations by existing buyers, ethnicity of buyers to relate to the prospect’s ethnicity, etc.
4. Intelligence about the Regulation: Including the difference between RERA carpet area and saleable area, rights of the real estate buyer, and the importance of approvals like CC, OC, etc.

If the AI tool can follow up with the prospect using the above intelligence, the prospect will experience true hyper-personalization in a real estate purchase, which is a rare phenomenon today.

Also Read: How Noida Expressways & RRTS Are Driving Property Growth

Such tools are also trimming the gestation period from the day the prospect mentally decides to buy real estate to the day the prospect concludes the transaction. Hyper-personalization with the help of AI is diminishing the gap between the builder, the buyer, the broker, and the banks, not only providing better customer experiences but also increasing conversion ratios in real estate sales.

So, look forward to more usage of Tech and AI in real estate transactions in the times to come and be a part of experiencing better CX and hyper-personalization in real estate transactions.