Reimagining Real Estate: How Housing.com is Building India’s Smartest PropTech Platform
Housing.com, under the leadership of CTO Abhisekh Makkar, is transforming the Indian real estate experience with a focus on technology that simplifies property discovery and transactions. Drawing from his experience at Amazon and Expedia, Makkar shares insights on how the platform is evolving to meet the needs of a diverse user base across urban metros and Tier-2/3 cities.
Lessons from Global Tech Giants
From his tenure at Amazon and Expedia, Makkar emphasizes a deep commitment to customer obsession—designing solutions based on actual user challenges. Operational excellence and scalability are key, ensuring the platform remains reliable under heavy load. Housing.com adopts a data-driven approach where every decision is backed by clear metrics. A culture of agility through rapid experimentation enables quick pivots based on user feedback. Lastly, autonomous product squads with end-to-end ownership foster speed and innovation across the platform.
Vision and App-First Strategy
Housing.com aims to be India’s most trusted, intelligent real estate platform, streamlining the entire home buying, selling, and renting process. With over 65% of users already on mobile, the app-first approach is critical. The strategy rests on four pillars:
- Personalized, Intent-Driven Experiences: Leveraging AI and behavioral insights to offer property recommendations aligned with user intent and locality preferences.
- Addressing Consumer Pain Points: Tackling issues like information overload, listing trust, and transaction delays with transparency and frictionless features.
- Self-Healing, Resilient Systems: Building cloud-native systems that detect and resolve issues automatically to maintain consistent performance.
- Full-Funnel Enablement Within the App: Integrating virtual tours, verified listings, instant loan offers, and digital documentation to provide a seamless end-to-end experience.
AI and Automation Enhancing the Home-Buying Journey
AI plays a central role in Housing.com’s platform. Large language models enable natural language search and personalized discovery while detecting listing fraud in real-time. AI tools audit images, forecast demand, and provide sales insights, enhancing both user experience and internal operations. Automation accelerates deployments, improves lead routing, and supports self-healing infrastructure. These capabilities collectively build a smarter, intent-focused platform that boosts trust and operational efficiency.
Deepening Personalization for Property Discovery
Personalization at Housing.com goes beyond reacting to user inputs; it anticipates needs based on where users are in their property journey. A dynamic user profiling engine tracks in-app behaviors, search patterns, and location signals to tailor content and communication. AI-driven features include:
- Property and locality recommendations aligned with lifestyle and intent.
- Dynamic re-ranking of listings as user behavior evolves.
- Auto-generated personalized content and timely notifications.
- Smart nudges for re-engagement, such as alerts on saved searches and price changes.
This real-time, hyper-personalized approach caters to diverse users, from first-time metro buyers to renters in smaller cities.
Cloud-Native Architecture for Scale and Reliability
Housing.com’s microservices-based cloud infrastructure enables independent scaling of services to handle traffic surges during peak periods like festive seasons. The architecture supports:
- High Availability & Resilience: Self-healing systems with auto-recovery and intelligent load balancing maintain uptime under heavy load.
- Optimized Digital Transactions: Secure, scalable APIs facilitate rent and fee payments, streamlining user journeys.
- Security by Design: Zero-trust principles, encrypted data pipelines, and automated compliance checks secure the platform.
- Data-Driven Intelligence: Real-time analytics monitor traffic and conversion metrics for faster decision-making.
This architecture supports not just scalability but also a responsive, secure, and high-performance user experience.
Recent Tech Upgrades Driving Impact
Over the last year, Housing.com has introduced several technology improvements that boosted performance and developer productivity:
- Advanced telemetry and dashboards cut incident resolution time by 40% through early issue detection.
- Enhanced security with zero-trust architecture and CI/CD-integrated vulnerability scanning improved incident detection speed by 60%.
- App optimizations reduced crashes by 30%, improved load times, and increased engagement.
- SEO enhancements like structured data and Core Web Vitals tuning increased organic visibility.
- End-to-end test automation accelerated release cycles while reducing manual QA effort.
- Integration of GenAI tools such as GitHub Copilot improved code generation and review efficiency.
- Streamlined CI/CD pipelines and engineering dashboards increased deployment velocity by 25%.
Adapting Digital Experiences for Urban and Emerging Cities
For urban metros, Housing.com offers AI-assisted journeys with smart advisor features, AR/VR property walkthroughs, digital loan integration, and real-time availability. These make property search and transactions seamless and mobile-centric.
In Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities, the focus is on accessibility and building trust through lightweight app versions, vernacular language support, voice-enabled search, and hybrid agent-assisted interactions. Verified listings and transparent pricing help first-time digital users gain confidence.
The goal across all regions is to provide personalized, intuitive, and trustworthy experiences aligned with users’ location, digital comfort, and transaction stage.
The Future of PropTech in India
India’s PropTech sector is shifting towards full-stack digital ecosystems covering search, discovery, transactions, financing, and post-possession services. AI, automation, and integration will be key drivers. Housing.com plans to evolve from a property search platform into a smart, app-first real estate assistant that offers personalized discovery, virtual experiences, transaction support, and embedded financial services. Trust, intelligence, and simplicity will guide its role in setting new standards for online property transactions.
Challenges in Building an App-First Real Estate Platform
Converting the complex, emotional, and high-stakes offline real estate process into a smooth mobile experience remains a challenge. Housing.com addresses this by:
- Implementing a modular, cloud-native architecture for agility and performance.
- Using AI-powered personalization to simplify decision-making.
- Providing agentic app experiences that proactively guide users.
- Embedding AR/VR, instant loan offers, and digital documentation for mobile-ready transactions.
- Maintaining deep observability and automation for reliability and fast feature rollouts.
- Building user trust through verified listings, fraud detection, and high-quality content.
Looking Ahead to 2030
By 2030, real estate in India will be fully digital, intelligent, and frictionless. Users will interact with AI-powered virtual advisors using natural language and voice, explore properties via immersive AR/VR, and complete paperless transactions with instant KYC and financing. Guidance will be hyper-personalized based on individual goals and affordability.
Housing.com aims to be the operating system for real estate in India, connecting buyers, sellers, developers, and financial institutions through a unified, intelligent platform.
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