Industrial Property Consultants Dilemma in India?

Indian property consultants' market is highly unorganized and has many inherent inefficiencies. I will be discussing the current state and challenges of unorganized real estate consultancy in India. There are roughly 10 lakh independent consultants working across India. This is one of the biggest employers after agriculture in India.

“But a major drawback of this industry is it lacks coordination. Since the real estate brokerage market is an unorganized one, the agents are mostly bound to their geographical location of business operation and are unable to form a network or make deals beyond that. In most cases, the real estate consultants are also denied the recognition they deserve.”

Here I am going to discuss the working of real estate consultants engaged in Industrial real estate which includes godown, warehouse, cold storage and land. The segment is very niche, but the condition is the same as the rest of service providers who deal in property. The GOI has introduced RERA in 2016, The real estate consultancy is now under consolidation for sale purchase of houses and commercial properties as it has now led a greater role played by real estate consultant’s thereby removing non serious players in this Industry.

The Industrial property market is more on leasing than buying. These properties are mainly Land, Warehouse, Cold Storage, Godown. Introduction of GST has changed the entire dynamics of this space. There are many players in this industry and majorly controlled by International Property Consultants. There are many localized property consultants who work in a specific geographical area, and they deal in all kinds of properties including Industrial. The common problem faced in leasing of Industrial unit by unorganized property consultants are as below:

• The information authenticity and requirement mismatch.
• Time wastage by clients as they deal with multiple brokers for the same requirement.
• Multiple brokers involved in a single deal thereby reduced income.
• No legal work to protect the consultant's service fee as most of the agreement is verbal.
• Dummy query circulated to gather inventory or liquidate current requirements by companies or service providers.

These are typical problem areas, and it leads to wastage of time, resource and money.

The Indian industrial leasing unorganized market is marred by above inefficiencies. This requires serious thought and a holistic approach to cater to above inefficiency.

We at Godamwale have developed a practice to cater to above inefficacy. Godamwale is a warehouse, godown, coldstorage,3PL discovery platform.

We practice following methodology to deal with our client:

• The warehouse, godown, coldstorage,3PL inventories available on our platform are verified and accurate.
• Any leads received are verified filtered before working on it.
• The service fee commitment is taken in writing.
• Site visits are arranged after a nominal fee is paid so as to check the seriousness.
• Once the property is selected. A report is submitted along with commercials.
• A negotiation is facilitated, and the deal is close to the customer's satisfaction.

The above practice has helped us to focus on serious leads. A database similar to CIBIL score needs to be developed where the customer is graded based on certain parameters thereby helping other service providers to make informed decisions before any engagement.

We would appreciate hearing your best practice to further fine tune guidelines which needs to be followed by real estate consultants to protect their interest and bring efficiency in the system.

Regards,
Godamwale Team