The Top 5 Property Portals of India - 2013. Here is our list!

We bring to you, India's top 5 real estate portals, in 1 easy as hell list! 

Update on April 03, 2015 - Please visit The Top 5 Property Portals of India - 2015. It is newer and more relevant.

This is exactly what you wanted to see, right? In one jaw dropping moment, let us give it to you straight then.

Question: Which are the top 5 property portals in India right now?

Answer:

#1. Magicbricks (www.magicbricks.com)
#2. 99acres (www.99acres.com)
#3. Commonfloor (www.commonfloor.com)
#4. Housing (www.housing.com)
#5. Indiaproperty (www.indiaproperty.com)

Thank you for your time and attention, ladies and gentlemen. The champagne and caviar are right over there. Feel free. Those of you who need an insight into how this ranking was done can read on.

How was the IREFD Top 5 Indian Property Portals Ranking Done?

First, we turned to Alexa to see what the global and Indian internet traffic rankings of the property portals were. The top 5 sites according to alexa.com are listed in the table below;

Alexa Traffic Rank Table - Indian Property Portals (November 11, 2013)

In terms of the Alexa traffic ranking, 99acres.com tops the list at being the 176th most visited website by the people of India, which is impressive. Magicbricks follows second, in turn followed by Commonfloor at third place on the podium. Positions four and five are held by Indiaproperty and Housing in that order. Please note that Housing has just made the transition from housing.co.in to housing.com which has cost them some serious rank loss at Alexa but by this time next year, their Alexa rank should improve significantly, we reckon.

In terms of bounce rates, Housing is at a cool 29.30% while Indiaproperty has a pretty high and unhealthy bounce rate of 50%, meaning that the average home buyer looking for property on the internet is spending a lot more time on Housing.com than on Indiaproperty.com.
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In the second round of evaluation, we used the Moz Ranking System and compared the top 5 sites we had shortlisted based on the Alexa Ranking and post that, the one to one conversations we had with home buyers, builders and brokers. Below is the table showing the Moz Rank Comparison of the property portals done using OpenSiteExplorer;

Moz Rank Table - India Property Portals

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Quick Understanding of Terms in the Table:

Page Authority - Predicts this page's ranking potential in the search engines based on an algorithm combination of all link metrics
Page MozRank - Their global link popularity metric, calculated in a similar fashion to Google's Page Rank (on a logarithmic scale from 1 -10)
Page MozTrust - Similar to MozRank, MozTrust estimates the distance from trusted seeds using a Page Rank like calculation

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In this Moz Comparo, Magicbricks seems to have it all with the 3 green ticks, meaning that it is currently the best portal according to Moz's ranking system and algorithms. Housing comes in second, confirming that the force is growing steadily and rapidly. 99acres surprisingly comes in at third place here, costing them the overall leading position and letting Magicbricks walk away with the final top slot. Commonfloor, followed by Indiaproperty (dudes check your bounce rates) draw up the end at slots 4 and 5 respectively.

Putting all those observations together, over a significant period of time, we got to that final top 5 list.

Our Personal Favourite?

Housing.com is our personal favourite. We just love the way the whole thing works. You must try it out to know what we mean. However, if we were Housing.com, we would have been the most afraid souls in the world of property portals. The interface and technology that makes browsing Housing.com a treat is not outer space science, so somewhere, as we write this, computer programmers are coding another Housing.com like property portal. In the real world of Real Estate, the action is in the listings. In the number of projects you have on offer. The true game lies in conversions. We hope the people at Housing are listening. 

Note for the real estate developer/ broker:

Almost all developers and brokers we spoke to said that 99acres generated the most amount of leads and sales followed closely by magicbricks and then the others. Also, Makaan.com seems to be rising pretty fast in terms of business yield for its advertisers and listings, which means they are the guys to look out for in the near future. Right now, keep putting your money on 99acres and Magicbricks. That will be money best spent.

Thats it for now. We shall be back again with a new list in a year's time.

Cheers!

About the author

Rahul Mishra is a real estate professional who started his life as a salesman, selling homes in the city of Kolkata since 2001. He worked pan India in real estate organisations like MMG Realty, Bengal Shrachi, The Phoenix Mills and The Space Group before helping co found Pillars with a single objective - To make real estate easy!

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