bengaluru indian realty is making an ambitious leap into ecommerce housingcom and snapdeal both backed by japans softbank are building technology and teams to sell new properties online to tap indias billiondollar real estate market to instill customer trust in a highrisk market the companies banking on their wealth of data offline partners and brand recognition selling houses online isnt an easy problem to solve said advitiya sharma cofounder housingcom it was in fact because of the lack of a focused realty technology product that selling real estate online hadnt picked up in november the mumbaibased company sold 115 apartments online for tata value homes generating gross merchandise value of at least rs50 crore over five days the website also launched a technology called slice view that allows users to go through each floor of a building project hovering over a particular flat shows availability and builtup area for this year housingcom already has 500 builder campaigns in the pipeline snapdeal too has aggressive plans to sell new projects on its website the marketplace was the first to sell tata value home projects online in september we are going very deep into the real estate category said amit maheshwari vice president at snapdeal which sells mobile phones to clothes and jewelry on its marketplace platform some experts argue selling real estate is a different ball game real estate transactions should be handled by the growing number of online real estate sites the nature of consumer products and real estate is different and do not match with snapdeals core competence said sunil wattal who teaches management information systems at temple university in the united states maheshwari however said the differentiator for snapdeal is its scale we bring much more visibility and customer footfall to developers that ultimately translates into economies of scale and we can pass over the benefit to our customers these portals are essentially an agent for us and we hope to get an additional reach into new geography and customers with our partnerships with them said dominic jesu dgmdigital marketing at bangaloreheadquartered real estate company brigade group at portals like housingcom additional technology features and information becomes a novelty because it instills trust in the customers mind ashish gupta cofounder of helion venture partners and a member on housingcoms board said housing takes on some of a brokers responsibility which is good because most people do not trust brokers and technology can help break that indias real estate market is estimated to reach 180 billion over rs 11 lakh crore by 2020 in just residential property the top eight indian cities will see an additional demand of 28 million units in the next five years according to property consultant cushman wakefield not all real estate search websites are rushing to sell property online according to commonfloorcom the main issue for buyers is finding a suitable property we empower customers with expert locality insights along with an exhaustive listings of properties said cofounder sumit jain times internetbacked magicbricks