Magicbricks ups its matchmaking game with an AI-powered reach maximizer engine – ET CIO

[ad_1]

Demands for residential properties are increasing day by day. According to online property marketplace Magicbricks’ Q4 2022 report, residential property demand has increased by 8.5% YoY and continues to rise. However, despite lakhs of property listings being available online, searching for a home is still a hassle due to a lack of a good recommendation engine.

Magicbricks makes that easy by matching buyers and sellers. A big component of their market is the developers. Thousands of developers put across multiple projects every day. However, projects that are relatively new and unknown don’t get buyers easily. The demand for those properties is on the lower side. “One day they will become very big, but today these projects do not find ready buyers,” says Rohit Manghnani, Chief Product Officer, Magicbricks. The challenge for a property portal is identifying the right set of buyers that would be interested in these new projects coming up in newer areas. This is the core of the problem that needed to be solved.

“You might think that a conventional search solves the problem. However, if a place is not known to the customers, they won’t search around it in the first place. Take Gurgaon for example; the city is not what it was 25 to 30 years ago. Even during the developing phase, the demand was minimal, but now it is an IT hub,” he elaborates further.

To promote these areas, developers either turn up physical banners or websites for advertising, hoping to get a good return on the investment. “All developers do not have the same capability set of analyzing different inventory performances and figuring out a way to optimize it,” he adds.

Magicbricks solve the problem by building a Project Market Scanner (PMS) engine, which leverages AI to make the process more seamless and convenient for both buyers and sellers.

The PMS engine acts as a reach maximizer that predicts results based on customers’ previous search history, allowing each project to reach its maximum response generation capacity.

“To build PMS, we worked on engines provided by AWS, Azure, Alibaba, and Google for our image and text-based searches,” said Manghnani.

PMS considers the subtle nuances that even customers themselves do not look for in the first place during their property search.“PMS helps us to identify the set of people who will be interested in a particular kind of inventory and then showcase that inventory to that buyer. It looks simple but it involves a lot of untold cues,” Manghnani mentions.

He further explains this with an example- “Suppose X is an individual who likes playing badminton and is interested in projects which come with a badminton court. Now if I have a new project with a badminton court, I’ll suggest that property to X. This has been figured out without asking X.”

The AI-powered Project Market Scanner helps in identifying which inventory type should be shown to which buyer and thus assists developers with access to relevant and high intent home-buyers.Rohit Manghnani, Chief Product Officer, Magicbricks

It also assists developers with access to relevant and high intent home-buyers by using sophisticated algorithms to identify which inventory type should be shown to which buyer. For this, Magicbricks looks at every kind of interaction that a buyer has with multiple properties, breaks down the properties into attributes, and then figures out the affinity to those attributes for the particular buyer. Anything that appeals to a buyer is shown to him/her without a filter. This is how it takes care of even the unstated intent.

“The first part of PMS is to show the properties relevant to the customer. The second part is including these nudges into the regular part of their journey. Some prefer nudges on their SRP (Suggested Retail Price), and some will like them on the details or locality page,” Manghnani says.

Figuring out the right timing for it is crucial. Nudging the customers too early or late in the search process would lead to the failure of this implementation.

The PMS engine increases the reach of developers by 65%, says Manghnani. “If as a developer I was reaching 100 audiences for a project earlier, now post the PMS implementation, I am able to reach 165 audiences. The lead-to-impression ratio also witnessed an increase from 10 clicks out of 100 impressions to 18 clicks on the same, showing an 80% jump” he adds.

“We expect to see a jump of 100-125% in revenue from those developers. At an overall business level, just this PMS engine is likely to give us a jump of 60% on our annual revenues,” he concludes.

[ad_2]

Source link