As a legacy sector, the global real estate industry has seen little progress over the last century. But, with the emergence of new technology and access to global data, there has been a rapid growth in product offerings to accommodate affordable housing, increase transparency, offer flexible payment plans, and increase yield, in this decade alone. Moreover, co-living and co-working have become household names, and flexible lease and buying plans using REITs (Real Estate Investment Trust) have gained traction all over the world.
Balaji Varadharajan (Founder and MD) of TheHouseMonk believes that the immediate future of real estate is going to be focused on customer experience and engagement. Through technology, transparency and enablement will impact all sub-verticals from purchasing to furnishing to rental management. They foresee that worldwide developers and community managers will continue to adopt new marketing strategies and adjust prices to market rates. In addition, there will be shift focus from “handover” to “handholding” using a wide range of SaaS technology and IoT platforms to increase yield and promote referrals.
In an exclusive interview with Business APAC, Balaji Varadharajan shared some of the most interesting details with us. Here are the excerpts.
TheHouseMonk: Standardized Experience across Locations
What are your views on the key challenges in the global estate technology space?
Understanding customer needs and developing solutions to ensure that a standardized experience is available to all customers in different geographies are some of the key challenges in the global real estate technology space. Another redeeming exercise that I strive to conduct is the horizontal deployment of best practices in real estate and property management across the globe and the distribution of transparent information through reports and guides. Hundreds of customers and clients in developing economies have been able to improve efficiency, cut costs, and monetize better from their real estate assets through the same. We are also responsible for a large pool of data that is compiled and computed on by our AI algorithms.
Team of Experts
Tell us something about your team and the culture of your company.
The team of TheHouseMonk is ingrained with a principle of “QUID”—Quality of customer experience, Utility of products deployed, Innovation at every turn, and continuous development and standardization. The lean team is made of experts in technology and product management with a key focus on customer success. I intend to keep the team as lean as possible through the years to come. We are also trending towards a favorable female sex ratio and strongly follow a culture of flat hierarchies and equality.
Providing a Nurturing Ecosystem
What are your key roles and responsibilities as the Founder of TheHouseMonk?
As the founder, my main role is to provide a nurturing ecosystem that enables the team to outperform existing versions of them and align themselves with the company’s goals. We believe the founders of all successful organizations try to build a team of experts who not only execute tasks to perfection but also contribute to the fronts of innovation and strategy. That said and done, we apportion significant lengths of my time to understand evolving markets, maintain relationships with our vast customer base, and tie-up with industry leaders to promote an asynchronous ecosystem that helps not just ourselves but our partners to grow as well.
Advanced Machine Learning Capabilities
Tell us something about TheHouseMonk and what makes it unique in the industry.
Today, we are serving a wide range of customers such as real estate developers, co-living and student housing companies, co-working companies, office, and building management teams, owners associations, management companies, property managers, security teams, and many more. Through our technology, we enable real estate businesses to serve their customers better. Our products not only cater to the management teams of the same but also to every employee and every customer of this interlinked web, thereby creating highly connected communities and spaces. What makes us unique is that we don’t believe in constraining ourselves to English speaking economies. We are proud to be the only organization that provides truly customized and comprehensive products to the Co-living industry including capabilities like white-labeling which helps them improve their customer experience while advancing in the fronts of branding and marketing as well. We have also inculcated advanced Machine Learning capabilities into our offering, which can help our clients streamline their operations and bring efficiency.
Pioneers of the Idea of a Unified Technology
Tell us something about yourself? What inspired you to start your journey in this industry?
I was always fascinated by the evolution of technology and business ecosystems in the past three decades. A true passion for implementing new-age solutions to solve problems and improve efficiencies in legacy industries started to creep in my early 20s when I realized that these companies were looking for a light and easy to implement products to improve their management and reporting structures and I was put in charge of the same.
Between 2012 and 2014, professional engagements called for constant relocation across the region. At this juncture, I took a step back to observe the process of finding a property, inspecting the same, getting documentation in place, negotiating, moving in, availing services, tracking the movement of employees and visitors, making monthly payments, requesting for assistance and interacting with the community, only to find that almost 97% of these activities were completely offline with no centralized system in place to collate all information pertaining to the same. Not only was there a loss of information at every stage, but I incurred mounting expenses to successfully accomplish these tasks. This sparked the idea of a unified technology-powered platform that not only manages contracts and data but also the nitty gritties of property, asset, security, accounts, and community management.
Conquering the Challenges
What are the challenges you and your company are facing right now?
For us, the most challenging part is in aiding clients to recognize the vast capability of the platform and utilize all relevant systems. To conquer this issue, we have modularized the product with an array of micro-products in place and have also implemented integration capabilities so that clients may pick and choose solutions truly relevant to them at that particular time and space.
Addressing the Customer Distresses
Please elaborate how are you planning to overcome these challenges?
Challenges arise in making sure that “all” the solutions provided by us are translated to end-users through the demographic range. Continuous training and development of our client counterparts are key in ensuring maximum utility. Zonal Customer Success teams have been deployed to ensure that customer distresses are addressed in the shortest possible time frames.
Leading towards Diversification
What are the key milestones you have set for your company for the year 2020?
For the next year, we have planned to launch our products in 9 more countries with marketplace and subscription capabilities which will cater to end customers globally. Also, internally, we have targeted a million daily users with ‘0’ customer complaints—a feat that hasn’t been achieved in the real estate space so far.
Read Full Magazine Prominent Leaders in Real Estate, 2019
