Editor’s note: Today's article comes from Amit Sharma, SVP of Engineering, NoBroker. Amit shares how NoBroker leverages Google Maps Platform to build a broker-free real-estate platform and promote sustainable living in India.
Before we founded NoBroker, India’s real-estate market was unorganized, inefficient, and prime for disruption. Middlemen dominated the house-hunting experience, charging high commissions and adding limited value for buyers, sellers, and tenants. With NoBroker, we wanted to eliminate these pain points and build a transparent, cost-effective, and convenient real-estate platform.
To take on India’s largest real-estate challenge, we knew we had to cut out intermediaries. Third-party brokers not only cost owners and house hunters months of additional rent but also foster an asymmetrical information ecosystem. Such a lack of transparency in local insights made it cumbersome to discover authentic listings and evaluate whether a property was the right fit. In 2014, we set out to offer a property marketplace that facilitates a free exchange of this information—minus the middlemen—and a decade later, NoBroker now saves Indians close to a billion dollars in annual brokerage.
Next, we plan to expand our broker-free vision to a dozen more Indian cities and differentiate in an increasingly cluttered space with AI-driven, value-added services. To support our transformational, nationwide growth, we leveraged the stable and precise geospatial architecture of Google Maps Platform.
Delivering a one-stop solution for property discovery
At the center of our real-estate experience is a rich, built-in ecosystem of hyperlocal intelligence. Typically, when a customer looks up properties online, they open a myriad of other browser tabs to understand the neighborhood, nearby points of interest, how long their commute will be, and the list goes on. Thanks to the Google Maps Platform Places API, NoBroker replaces this tedious workflow with a single, all-in-one dashboard. Here, users can comfortably access practical insights from public transportation proximity to the availability of schools and hospitals. This ensures people have everything they need to find their new home on our app and website, enhancing our user conversion rates by 30-40%.
Similarly, we streamlined the customer journey. With the help of the Google Maps Platform neighborhood data and the Distance Matrix API, NoBroker can intelligently offer personalized recommendations based on a location’s quality-of-life indicators, like local amenities, live traffic trends, and the user’s daily commute. Since we’ve rolled out these AI-powered decision-making tools, far fewer people have abandoned their searches, and they’re more actively engaged with our products.
The metro-based search option lets customers zero in on housing located near public transportation routes.
In addition, the Maps JavaScript API allowed us to integrate its trusted and familiar interactive map into our website. When there’s a street or an area a customer is interested in exploring, they can skip punching in the address text while searching, and instead drop a marker in their desired location. Even in crowded, metropolitan clusters, the smooth markers quickly enable people to explore multiple listings that are close to each other.
Making listing properties frictionless
The user-friendly SDKs from Google Maps Platform came in handy for us to ease onboarding for homeowners and sellers, too. Property developers, for example, can plug their NoBroker data into Google Maps and list homes for sale or rent in an instant. New sellers also no longer need to worry if the address they have registered is accurate enough for tenants to discover them. Behind the scenes, the Geocoding API takes any vague addresses and turns them into pinpoint locations so that interested parties can visualize them on a map before a visit and comfortably navigate to them, irrespective of whether they’re traveling by foot, car, or public transit.
Users can search for nearby essentials such as hospitals, schools, and ATMs.
Migrating our accelerating business onto the Google Maps Platform was a breeze as well. Google’s well-documented SDKs sped up onboarding and implementation, so there was little to no impact on traffic and quality of experience, and tech partner Lepton ensured the process adhered to best practices.
De-congesting urban clusters, one city at a time
We know, however, that in the future a broker-free model alone won’t be enough to truly disrupt the real-estate market. Now that we have a robust tech foundation in place, we want to take advantage of our industry leadership to deliver positive changes and promote eco-friendly urban development. Our metro-based search option epitomizes this ambition. It lets customers zero in on housing located near public transportation routes and reduce dependency on private vehicles, as well as the need to live close to office complexes and IT parks. This feature will relieve the pressure on natural resources, which are under severe strain due to overcrowding in cities, and rationalize rents.
To continue to innovate and stay a step ahead of the competition, we look forward to deploying more of the Google Maps Platform advanced geospatial APIs. Our investment in Google’s technology has proven to be a cornerstone of our success and underpins our country-wide mission with reliable and scalable mapping technologies.
