People perceive us as exactly what we are – a well-established and trusted company representing the full range of real estate options in North India, from downtown condominiums and residential estates to commercial real estate. In terms of positioning, BOP is basically a bulk sales company where we underwrite certain property and we take the exclusive sales and marketing rights of the project or certain number of tasks in the project in total and then we go on to the sell the entire project in the market in a pre-specified duration.
Incorporated in 2007 as Better Option Propmart Pvt Ltd, BOP has come a long way in a very short period of time. In the last five years, BOP has grown exponentially, and can easily lay claim to being the biggest real estate advisory firm in the Indian market. Started with only two staff members in 2007, the Group now has over 700+ professional staff. BOP is handling real estate inventory worth more than Rs 4000 crore that is expected to be sold off by December 2011.
As a leading real estate consultant, BOP serves the holistic real estate needs of discerning clients. Till date, Group has helped more than 35,000 clients in their real estate investments, providing professional and personalised services to individual and corporate clients. This is what drives them, and because of this, they have witnessed an unprecedented growth in a remarkably short span of time.
BOP is one of the very few genuine underwriters in the real estate market. It is the first home grown International Property Consultant (IPC) of India and presently has branches in eight Indian cities, apart from four studios in the NCR. The company’s vision is to play a major role in organising the real estate market in the country and becoming India’s first internationally acclaimed IPC in its true sense. To achieve this, BOP has created a strong channel pyramid – from 5 to 700 partners in five years, adopted the best practices stands in customer services, created a blueprint for taking BOP to 100 locations within India and internationally within two years from now. BOP also has plans to set up 15 studios in the other major towns of India within the current financial year.
So far BOP has done more than 35000 transactions on behalf of various developers including Jaypee Group, 3Cs, Unitech, Ansal API, Wave Group, Omaxe, and Logix Group. Even during peak recession in May 2008, when all the projects were on hold, BOP did bookings of more than 3600 homes of Jaypee Greens Aman residential project in a single day. This is a record for a single property consultancy entity in the country for sales made in a single day. Today, BOP manages real estate investment portfolio for select investors, with the total portfolio managed coming to the tune of approximately Rs 2000 crore for 2011-12 YTD.
From Bulk to Retailing
Since BOP is a Bulk Sales Specialist and offers 360 degrees solutions to both the developers and the customers, we sit down with the developer right at the point of land acquisition and advise the developers from land acquisition to project sales. Developers take our inputs at every further step including architecture, unit plans and specifications. Then we go on to make a marketing plan outlay with a direct correlation to sales. Everything is time bound and revenue focused. Most developers are really comfortable handing over the entire inventory to BOP because this way the sales process is smoothened out, and the customer is facilitated to a great extent.
Although BOP’s inputs to the developer on product mix, layouts and unit plans are predominantly based on what the customer wants, we go a step further and create marketing campaigns across audiences. Apart from providing quality services with relation to the documentation and sales process, we help the customers out in terms of financing, resale and post sales processes as well.
Footprint Expansion
BOP is known for its innovations and for being the first mover in the market to adopt any new media, technology or idea. The growth of BOP is in multiple percentages and annual turnover is around Rs 10,000 crore. As far as broker industry is concerned, I think in the next three years, we would be known as the indisputable leader in the real estate service in India besides becoming the country’s first International Property Consultant. BOP is handling portfolios worth more than Rs 2000 crore, and we have just touched the tip of the iceberg. I believe there is a potential to increase our portfolio management to Rs 5000 crore within the next year itself.
BOP is the first Indian real estate company to introduce the concept of real estate boutiques which are called “BOP Studio”, where each shoppe has sit-in consultants for detailed and free counseling to every walk in customer. The customers will get to see live presentations of the various upcoming as well as existing projects illustrated by trained professionals, and get their various queries solved by the experts. It’s a unique concept where BOP wants to bring world class retail experience to real estate buyers. We expect people to perceive BOP as a holistic real estate advisory hub than a mere property broker. The real estate buyers in tier II cities are still not exposed to professionally guided consultancy and that is why we have hired 100 professionals in our studios. BOP has drawn up an ambitious project to set up a chain of 100 real estate boutiques across India over the next two years. BOP Studio is based on the model of a walk-in store for property consultancy and purchase and boasts of having an ambience of a high-end store and showcases various projects across various north Indian cities. The Group is investing at least Rs 60 lakh per studio and planning to open 2000 sq ft high street outlets at prime locations in the target cities.
The company is on a spree signing up big ticket builders for bulk marketing deals. It has inked comprehensive marketing partnerships with top developers and has divided its real estate advisory business into five broad heads with separate profit centre operations: corporate, residential, land bank management global advisory & research valuation and consulting services. We currently have eight offices across North India and representative offices in Mumbai and Dubai and in the next two years time, we would be able to expand our operations throughout India and in another four to five countries.
Implementing SAP ERP
SAP was an essential process to streamline our services and CRM into one consolidated flow. Today we can open my interface and know about a random conversation that an executive had with a prospective customer in October 2010! Not only that, SAP enables a stringent process and information control, and optimises each sales opportunity. SAP enables us to track every single customer activity right from the first contact made by either party, down to the final document or payment reminder sent by my sales officers. This also ensures 100% transparency as we are open to audits.
TECHNOLOGY AND SALES STRATEGIES
Today, more and more people have access to liquidity and a lot of people want to establish their homes or own some sort of property in the NCR. But people are very careful and there is more competition. We have adapted to this by increasing our infrastructure to cater to the volumes. We have also professionalised our own set-up and completely over-hauled the entire system. Our business model has been re-defined by various developers. Three years ago, we used to talk on different terms, today the terms are different. We have a full-fledged home-loan division if the customer wants a holistic solution, which not only connects the customer with the bank but also helps the customer in documentation.
We have established completely automated offices. Each professional that we hire is equipped with all modern gadgets to make best possible presentations to our clients, which make the entire experience visually appealing. We have an organisational structure where the sales team is divided under various business heads and each business head has got multiple team leaders under him. Our inventory management is also very unique. This is something that only we do; I don’t know of anybody else who does this. The entire inventory is available to any of our channel partners at any point of time. So, there is no time wastage or duplication of inventory allocation.
WHERE DOES THE DIFFERENCE LIE?
BOP offers 360 degree solutions to both the developer and the customer. This way we are connecting all the dots in the real estate space. We are one of the very few bulk selling and marketing companies in the Real Estate space in India and we make it our top priority to keep our finger on the pulse of the market – which has transformed itself over the years and still keeps changing every day – by maintaining the resources for keeping a keen eye on the trends – price trends, migration and demographic trends, whatever it takes. When we hire anybody, we look at three things – one, they should have passion for developing a career in real estate; two, they should have some sort of service sector orientation. So, we look at people from hospitality, aviation, insurance and banking industries, as these sectors have proved to be sources of quality manpower for us; three, we look for a general professional attitude, which is missing in a lot of companies in this vertical today.
IMPACT OF SOCIAL MEDIA
BOP is one of the biggest spenders in marketing in the industry. Being a brokerage firm, our annual marketing spend exceeds Rs 30 cr. We are working with several developers and ours is primarily a sales oriented marketing. We don’t have to brand a developer’s project because that is their responsibility. We spend a substantial amount of money in creating the BOP brand but that is also very customer-oriented and we don’t need to do any B2B branding as of now.
Our use of social media has been in two ways. I have several key areas of my business that keep me connected with clients, local real estate agents, local vendors, national/ international agents and information sources. By using this one source, I am able to easily stay on top of all these areas. Keeping in touch with my clients is a top priority for me and an important part of my business plan for referral/repeat business. I also try to use a wide variety of content and make it a point not to constantly tout my own listings/sales.
KEY TO SUCCESS
Have a lot of fun. Work hard and party harder.
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