Housing.com to spend Rs 40 crore on advertising for the next one year

The brand plans to expand its services under housing edge, co-living, plots and commercial listings.

Housing.com, an online real estate company has announced the launch of its latest TV and digital advertising campaign, Parr...se Perfect. Through this 360-degree campaign, the brand simplifies the home buying and selling and renting journey for consumers. The brand will invest around Rs 40 crore on advertising over the next 12 months.

Additionally, the brand has just started building its presence in tier-2 cities. Snehil Gautam, chief growth and marketing officer, Housing.com, speaks to afaqs! about the company's growth plans, advertising spend, and more.

Edited excerpts:

What was the consumer insight behind your campaign?

Home buying is the biggest purchase a person makes in their lifetime. We have seen that there is always a doubt in people’s mind when they are finding a home for themselves. We are celebrating that doubt with our consumers through our latest campaign.

Therefore, the campaign is titled Parr…se Perfect (Parr which means “but”, referring to doubts that arise in anyone’s mind dealing with property sale and purchase). On the property seeker side, our target audience is people in the 25-35 age group residing in tier-1 cities. This is the reason the characters in our campaign are a double-income-no-kid couple.

What is the media mix for this campaign?

Our campaign is a 360-marketing campaign, but we plan to spend more on television and digital avenues like OTT, YouTube, and other social media platforms. For the last two years we have seen a shift in consumer preferences from a media consumption standpoint. Our TG is shifting from watching television to consuming content on digital mediums, hence, we are changing our media mix towards OTT and social media platforms.

And have consumer preferences changed with respect to home buying and selling too?

We noticed some green shoots of growth sprouting as a result of the pandemic, especially from the real estate segment. Due to the pandemic, people have realised the importance of a home, and so launches and sales in the real estate sector have significantly increased. Even the hybrid work policy has increased the momentum of this sector and has significantly impacted sales.

Another thing we observed recently is that there has been almost a 200% growth in users from tier-2 cities on our platform. Our consumers realised that online is the only way, and the pandemic made them adapt to and discover online as a way to sell and purchase houses.

How different are the needs of consumers in tier-2 market as compared to tier-1?

Our business is still concentrated in tier-1 cities. Since, 80% of our business is coming from tier-1 cities, so we focus more on tier-1 only. We have just started monetising tier-2 cities. We are trying to figure out if there are insights that are different in tier-2 cities from tier-1. But so far, we have seen that insights are very similar, but property requirements and price points are a little different in tier-2 compared to tier-1 cities.

The online home buying and renting segment has several players, how are you differentiating yourself?

Certain platforms have positioned themselves as doing away with brokers. However, we believe that brokerage and no brokerage both can exist in home buying. There is a segment of property owners and seekers who believe that they do not want to involve brokers in their buying and searching journey but there is another segment of property seekers and owners who are more about convenience in life, they want an intermediary to take care of all the hassle behind the buying, selling and renting journey.

We believe that both pieces can co-exist. Hence, we have maximum choices on our property portal and that’s how we are different from any other platform.

What are your expansion plans?

We are getting into tier-2 cities now. There are two pillars in market developments that we are working on. Firstly, we want to get deeper into existing markets of tier-1 cities, so we will be increasing our seller base in tier-1 cities by bombarding our brand campaigns for property seekers and sellers.

Second, increasing coverage in tier-2 cities with the help of different products like creating new visualisation products and visibility of new properties on our platforms to sell. We also plan to expand its services under housing edge, co-living, plots and commercial listings. We have grown significantly in the last 12 months. We had a 50% year-on-year growth in FY22.