Internet influences over 50 percent real estate buying decisions, says study

Hyderabad, June 18 (IANS) Over fifty percent of real estate buyers decisions are influenced by Internet research, revealed a study by Google India.

The study is based on a pan India offline research conducted by Zinnov and real estate related search query trends on Google.

Researching online for real estate information was not limited to metros but also extended to buyers in tier II cities, said a Google release here Wednesday.

The overall influence of Internet on real estate transaction value of both residential and commercial property including rentals amounted to $43 billion, with $31 billion for residential and $12 billion for commercial properties.

The offline survey conducted across 15 cities in India with over 6,000 respondents revealed that 74 percent of real estate research online was focused on residential buying and 26 percent focused on residential renting.

About 47 percent respondents were indifferent to new or resale property as the criteria for research focused more on their space requirement, budget and location. About 23 percent respondents were in the market for resale property only, and 30 percent were looking for new property under construction.

In the survey, respondents rated Internet in the top three medium for information for real estate research, with 24 percent respondents rating Internet as the top destination for information. Print media and sales-broker offices were the rated as the other top two information sources for property information.

"Real estate queries on Google search have been growing consistently registering over 3x growth in the last three years, the rate of query growth is even higher for tier 2 cities and growing at over 350 percent. Our search query data shows that over 53 percent search queries are done with clear purchase intent," said Nitin Bawankule, industry director, Google India.