IndiaMLS's new property portal is a "Pay-Per-Listing"

IndiaMLS, a company whose mission statement is to create the largest and most accurate database of property listings in India, has come out with one of India's first Multiple Listing Service platform, customized for Indian property brokers which does not use a Pay-Per-Listing model. IndiaMLS has brought to India and customized the MLS, also considered as the greatest invention in real estate technology.

The Real Estate Regulatory Authority (RERA) has now been in place for more than two years, yet the Indian real estate market remains fragmented and unstructured, but equally bad are the traditional web portals which display their property listing data to the public.

While speaking to Jay Patel, Founder and CEO of IndiaMLS, he said, " Almost every one of the real estate websites in India uses a “Pay-Per-Listing” model which essentially means brokers must pay to advertise their listings on the websites. The result is tons of garbage data because anyone can post anything they want as long as they’re willing to pay for it. Thus, 80% of the listings on these sites are fake, duplicate, or old, and have very few unique listings."

Patel also highlighted three main problems with the Pay-Per-Listing (PPL) concept:

1. Pay-Per-Listing model results in creating Junk database: Most of the property portals sell listing packages to brokers, such as 200 listings for a flat fee of INR 30,000, or more. The average broker has only 25 listings, so in using the package, he enters the same listings on the website multiple times to try to keep the listings ‘fresh’ and at the top of list, or he may also enter completely fake listings for the sole purpose of finding new clients who will inquire about those fake listings.Thus, compromising the quality of the database.
2. No centralized database in the PPL Model used by Indian property portal: In the PPL model used by Indian real estate portals, there is no sharing of data. Each portal has and maintains its own database, but they have no way of verifying which properties get sold, rented, or cancelled, thus these listings are never removed from the database.  Even worse for consumers is they have to visit many different sites to try to find a suitable property. It would be much easier if everyone can go to one central website for quality data and market information. That is precisely what the MLS does for the real estate industry.
3. Property portals charge the brokers a huge amount of money to list properties which the portals actually need even more than the brokers to run their property portals successfully: A broker's property listing is like an asset for the property portal, still the portals charge the brokers a huge amount of money to list properties on their website. Without the broker’s listings, portals would have no consumer traffic, and without visitors on the site, they would have no advertising revenues, and without revenue the portals could not survive. Brokers will ultimately realize that they don’t need to pay to list their properties, thus the Pay-Per-Listing model will fail.

Unlike any other property portal in India, IndiaMLS is unique in its approach and creates one central database of all residential and commercial property listings in each city called a Multiple Listing Service (MLS), and the MLS system maintains the quality of that database, thus little or no duplicate, sold, or junk listings would be found.  Brokers do not need to waste time looking on many sites to find properties for their clients.

The MLS is not a Pay-Per-Listing concept. It utilizes a subscription-based model, where brokers pay a flat annual membership fee. They get unlimited listings, and they must agree to operate by the MLS’ Code-of-Conduct. The MLS is a proven concept which comes from the United States where it has been the backbone of the entire real estate industry there. IndiaMLS is a similar B2B solution designed for all professional brokers in India, and it will contain the most accurate sale or rental, residential and commercial listings in the country. This allows sellers to quickly find buyers for their sale properties, making it the most effective target marketing tool for the industry, unlike any other realty portal in India.

SOURCE IndiaMLS

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