While buying property, where do you go to look for real estate deals and purchases? If you think the answer is property dealers and newspapers ads, you are wrong. Seventy-four per cent of real estate research is online by people focused on residential buying and 26% focused on residential renting, says a report released by Google on Wednesday.
The overall influence of internet, the report says, on real estate transaction value of both residential and commercial property, including rentals, amounts to $43 billion, with $31 billion for residential and $12 billion for commercial property. The study, by Google and Zinnov, a management consulting company, was conducted across 15 cities in India with over 6,000 respondents. ?Real estate queries on Google search have registered over 3x growth in three years, with tier-2 cities growing at 350%. Our search query data shows that over 53% search queries are done with a clear intent of purchase,? says Nitin Bawankule, industry director, Google India.
When it comes to information on real estate research, respondents rated internet as the third medium, with print media and sales-broker taking the top two spots.