Realty portal Housing.com on Friday said online searches for residential properties on its platform increased in June after witnessing a decline in the preceding two months, owing to the second wave of COVID pandemic, indicating a possible revival in actual demand in the second half of this year.
Delhi-NCR region (comprising Gurugram, Noida, Greater Noida, Faridabad, and Ghaziabad micro markets) witnessed maximum online property searches by potential homebuyers in June to secure the top position, Housing.com said in a statement.
In the list of top 20 cities with high online property search activities, Mumbai ranks second, followed by Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Ludhiana, Pune, Goa, Surat, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Guwahati, Varanasi, Amritsar, Coimbatore, Patna, Meerut, Jaipur, Kanpur, and Lucknow.
Housing.com, which is owned by Singapore-based Elara Technologies that also runs PropTiger and Makaan.com, has launched an Indian residential index for online search (IRIS) that will track potential buyers' activity on its platform on a monthly basis.
The index has been created with the objective of giving an in-depth view of buyer activity in India by tracking 42 key cities driving the residential market.
Housing.com's IRIS inched up 9 points month-on-month in June after a slowdown in online searches for residential properties during April and May 2021. The national online demand is up by 26 points year on year, despite a similar lockdown situation in both periods.
"The index shot up in June 2021, on the back of opening up of lockdowns as active COVID-19 cases subsided. The demand uptick in June 2021 and the ebbing of the second wave of the pandemic indicates a rise in demand in the coming months," Housing.com said in a statement.
As per our research, both online and offline trends hint at a speedier bounce back from the impact of the second COVID wave, said Dhruv Agarwala, Group CEO, Housing.com, Makaan.com, and PropTiger. The demand in Tier 2 cities has recovered more quickly than in the top cities, demonstrating resilience during the pandemic, he added. "The entire idea behind the launch of IRIS is to present the online residential demand dynamics in a comprehensible format to various stakeholders."
"The index brings forth macro and micro level real estate market insights through the knowledge gathered from the search activity of millions of potential homebuyers on the Housing.com platform," said Mani Rangarajan, Group COO, Housing.com, Makaan.com, and PropTiger.
The index will provide monthly insights on buyer activity as observed on Housing.com, giving a comparative analysis at city and locality levels to homebuyers, sellers, agents, policy makers, and real estate analysts.
"A majority of initial searches for buying a home takes place online and thus the online search trend is a leading indicator for developing offline homebuyer activity in a city in the near to mid-term," said Ankita Sood, Director & Head of Research, Housing.com, Makaan.com, and PropTiger.
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