MagicBricks.com adds locality specific feature 'neighbourhoods'

MagicBricks.com, a realty classifieds site owned by Times Business Solutions Ltd, has introduced a 'neighbourhoods' feature, adding neighbourhood or locality specific content. The portal has rolled out content such as ratings, reviews, detailed maps, photos and videos at the locality level mostly for popular neighbourhoods across major cities.

"This will help the user quickly focus on only the selected localities of his choice. Making property search efficient and productive to the user, we believe, will help migrate more steps of the property buying cycle to online," said Sudhir Pai, business head, MagicBricks.

According to MagicBricks' in-house research, 95 per cent of online property seekers, especially NRIs, want to get a look and feel of a locality before making a contact.

As of now, 200 localities across five cities have been integrated with HD photos and videos on the site. The photos are geo-tagged, which means that user can see the actual photo of the location on the map. The neighbourhoods' information is integrated with locality snapshots, search results and detailed listing pages.

Recently, Chennai-headquartered Metroplots Pvt Ltd, the company that owns and operates the residential property transaction portal Metroplots.com, revamped the site, introduced value-added features and launched mobile apps for Android and iOS platforms for a wider reach. It added a 'compare' tool (for comparing different properties), an advisory page (with location-specific real estate statistics) and an interactive map (for the mobile site).

Other real estate portals like Housing, CommonFloor, etc also have detailed map viewing for neighbourhood-specific search. In March this year, CommonFloor launched  augmented reality (AR)-based search for properties and apartments. Using the AR view, a user can point his/her phone in any direction and the app will automatically detect available properties in that direction in a specified kilometre range.