The Real Estate sector is the most globally recognized sector and the second-largest employer after Agriculture. It comprises of four sub-sectors - Housing, Retail, Hospitality, and Commercial. With the growth of the corporate environment and rising demand for office space as well as urban and semi-urban accommodations, this sector is growing tremendously. The real estate sector in India is expected to reach a market size of US$ 1 trillion by 2030 from US$ 120 billion in 2017, contributing 13% of the country’s GDP by 2025. Maharashtra 1st state to form a conciliation committee under the new
Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act (RERA), comprising a panel representing builders and consumer groups to arbitrate complaints.
Being a PGDM-Marketing student of SIMSR, I did my summer internship in the Real Estate firm based in Mumbai, which is
A&O Realty (Ashapura & Options). It is a private organization, incorporated on 08 October 2013 and registered at Registrar of Companies (RoC), founded by Mr. Chetan Sundarji Bhanushali and Mr. Girish Patel with an authorized share capital of Rs. 100,000 and its paid-up capital is Rs. 100,000. It is involved in Real estate activities with own or leased property. In order to create this enterprise, A&O Realty has embarked on a transformation journey wherein the focus is to build a consumer-centric organization in the increasingly individualistic Residential sector, with a vision to enhance the city lifestyle.
Roles and Responsibilities as a Sales and Marketing intern:
MARKETING INTELLIGENCE: It included gathering and analyzing the information regarding the real estate market and various projects of builders in the vicinity. It involves competitive profiling with other projects, thereby shaping your company’s strategies. It determines your strengths and shortcomings within the market, giving your business a distinct advantage from traditional and non-traditional competition. The strategy to analysis competition revolves around establishing your potential competitors while exhibiting the product life cycle.
PROMOTIONS:
Above the Line (ATL) advertising strategies focus on directing the communication towards the mass market, thereby helping the firm reach a larger audience and create brand visibility.
1. Television: Advertising campaigns are directed at the regional level for its various ongoing projects.
2. Print media: Promotional messages in newspapers, online articles, and catalogues.
3. Cold calling campaign: It involved tele-calling for the database of various channel partners.
4. Social Media Marketing: Formulating advertisements and delivering them regularly including handling the Facebook and Instagram pages.
Below the Line (BTL) advertising activities are more focused, directed towards highly targeted specific groups of customers, keeping in mind the demographic and psychographic characteristics of those customer segments. Hence, communication is highly personalized with the objective of gaining conversions.
1. Outdoor advertisements: Billboards, flyers/pamphlets, banners, posters, standees.
2. Direct marketing: SMS, E-mails, social media marketing, Tele-marketing.
3. Sponsorship: Events, CP meet.
4. Public Relations: Building and maintaining a healthy professional relationship with Channel Partners in long run by motivating them to bring the walk-ins to the site for the project and also provide with sources of advertisement of the project for marketing. Also, building a long term relationship based on trust with customers via in-person demonstrations until the date of possession to retain them and beyond to cherish them via the after-sales services provided to them. This would spread the information of our project by the greatest means of communication WOM (Word-Of-Mouth).
5. In-store Promotion: Audio-video walkthrough (AV), model, sample and show flats, sales promotions.
6. Remarketing: Retargeting the customers back to the site who had previously shown the interest.
PRICING STRATEGIES: Depending on the various parameters, we assisted in redefining the price for different flats, create various discount offers and schemes for early bird offers, festivals, etc. Parameters like competitor pricing with respect to the locality, consumer purchasing behaviour, floor number/height, direction, view, ventilation, etc. were considered.
STRATEGIC SOURCING: It involves studying and interpreting the behaviour and needs of Channel Partners by meeting around 200 new Channel Partners in a month. The new Channel Partners were being identified individually and then we built a healthy relationship by engaging personally with them. Further, it called for identification and analyzing the CP’s strengths, weaknesses, and requirements as CP team strength and office size, Territory of his work, CP’s current projects, CP’s Marketing activities, collated together thereby exposed to Database Management.
CUSTOMER PROFILING: Analyzing the behaviour and concluding as to whether the client is interested. This filtering would save time and increase the efficiency of the employees by devoting the time to persuade the interested ones in order to close a deal.
SALES PLANNING & CLOSING: Working on the creation of the sales plan to increase the walk-ins and implementing the inbound and outbound strategies to generate the leads including various stated promotional activities. Further, by maintaining guest relations and consumer profiling, worked on closing the deal under the guidance of closing managers.