MagicBricks.com is an online property portal from Times Business Solutions, which provides property listings, advice and news on buying or renting properties. Earlier this month, the website launched locality pages with rates, photos, maps and other media and last month, it had introduced a luxury section to list premium high end luxury properties to its users. The website also has a home decor section, which the website had relaunched in December 2012 in its new avatar. We spoke to Sudhir Pai, Business Head of MagicBricks regarding the launch of these new features, response to their website, profitability of their business, among others. Local Search and Other New Features Medianama: Why did you decide to launch new local search features on your website? What is the consumer need for these features? What kind of research did you do to conclude a need? Pai: We were keen to migrate more offline processes onto our online platform. The primary purpose for neighborhoods feature was to eliminate wasteful site visits. Therefore, we decided to show them videos and photos showing how a locality looks like and pricing among others, thereby providing a good sense of what the locality is. The site also offers reviews and ratings of these localities. Primary objective was to make house hunting more convenient by making them use more services online. As far as research is concerned, we constantly do user need gap analysis as part of our product development and we keep checking what features are being used by visitors and are not being used, through various channels that feed…
