Pandemic Saw 2X Rise In Home Owners & Landlords From Tier-2 Going Online To Sell Properties: Magicbricks Owner Services Report

 

·   Lucknow, Jaipur and Coimbatore lead the list among Tier-2 cities

·   Whitefield (Bangalore), Velachery (Chennai), Gachibowli (Hyderabad) top-localities in Tier-1 cities with maximum sellers taking the online route

·   40% of landlords shortlist six properties on an average before closing a deal

·   27% of landlords are taking 3-6 months in deciding to sell their property

With digital adoption on the rise in India’s real estate sector, Tier-2 cities like Lucknow, Jaipur and Coimbatore have witnessed a 2X rise in homeowners and landlords opting for online services to sell their properties during the pandemic year, reveals the latest Magicbricks Owner Services consumer study – How Indians Sold Their Homes During The Pandemic Year?

Landlords and homeowners are now looking for a host of specialised online services like getting a professional photo shoot done, creating a crisp content description, getting best online listings for quick and best responses, and having a dedicated relationship manager to close the deal. And thus, homeowners and landlords in Tier-2 cities are now increasingly taking the digital route to expand their reach to find buyers through Magicbricks Owner Services.

The study also reveals that landlords and owners from over 500 cities and towns across India are now opting for digital solutions to sell their properties. Among the Tier-2 cities, Lucknow tops the list followed by Jaipur, Coimbatore, Vadodara, Indore, Nagpur, Bhubaneshwar, Vishakhapatnam, Patna and Bhopal.

Top localities in Tier-2 cities with maximum sellers online are, Gomtinagar (Lucknow), Indiranagar (Lucknow), Mansarovar (Jaipur), Saravanampatty (Coimbatore), Patia (Bhubaneshwar), Super Corridor (Indore), Manish Nagar(Nagpur), Vasna Bhayli Road (Vadodara), Madurwada (Vizag), Saguna More (Patna), and Hoshangabad (Bhopal).

As per the study, the duration for selling properties varies from 0-3 months for 57% of the sellers, 3-6 months for 27% and over 6 months for 16%. And since the pandemic has given a boost to owners and sellers to go the digital route, their enthusiasm has been contagious as 40% of the sellers are now shortlisting on an average six buyers before closing the deal.

In terms of digital adoption in Tier-1 cities, Bangalore is leading the chart followed by Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune and Mumbai. Sellers from top localities like Whitefield, Velachery, Gachibowli are taking the online route for listing and selling their properties in Bengaluru.

Key reasons for this heightened interest in selling properties by the home owners includes:

·         Buying bigger homes by selling smaller ones

·         Lower purchase cost

·         Attractive government schemes

·         Low interest rate

·         Jump in buyer interest

·        Sellers offering properties as the high liquidity situation in the market may not sustain for long

·         Improvement in transport and connectivity

The launch of Owner Services is in line with Magicbricks’ promise of creating a holistic Property Services marketplace that provides all property seekers a seamless experience under one roof. Magicbricks aim to streamline the process and be a one-stop-shop for the property seeker during the entire journey.

Symphony Ltd Launches New Summer Campaign “Mann Thanda Tann Taaza Rahe”

Symphony Ltd., world’s largest manufacturer of air coolers has launched a heart-warming campaign ‘Mann Thanda Tann Taaza Rahe’. The brand kickstarts the campaign through this brand film that enlightens fresh and cool air can bring new perspective in people’s lives. With the onset of April heat, it’s the perfect time for this advertisement to strike a chord with the Indian audience. It has been dubbed in several languages like Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Bengali.The 360-degree campaign will be promoted across television, digital, radio, OOH and other mediums. 

The ad follows the story of a woman who walks into her home on her birthday and is instantly greeted with refreshing air. As she makes her way into the house, she finds gifts scattered all around, staged by her husband as each room is decorated with presents. In the bedroom as her husband greets her, he jokingly asks about the papers she’s holding in her hands and she replies saying divorce papers which he laughs off. But she’s seen throwing the papers into the hamper, as she accepts his efforts and still finds something to salvage, giving her a fresh perspective after her mind cools down; with a message saying fresh air brings a fresh chapter in one’s life. 

Air cooler is the need of the hour this year as India observes early summers with increase in temperature.  Symphony offers a wide range of air coolers, from household to commercial to industrial coolers. These products are portable, sustainable in nature and very cost-efficient. With the range starting from Rs. 5,299, they are easily available on https://www.symphonylimited.com/ and other e-commerce portals as well as all leading retail outlets.

Speaking about the campaign, Mr. Rajesh Mishra, President - Sales and Marketing, Symphony says, “Symphony as the leading air cooler company worldwide, is ready to come forth with bigger, better plans; and what could be better than a story of saving love? With #MannThandaTannTaaza we aim at tugging the heartstrings of our audience by highlighting how imperative it is to keep oneself calm and refreshed, no matter how challenging the times may be.” 

Links to the campaign: https://m.facebook.com/Symphonylimited/videos/470434587333438/ 

About Symphony Limited : Symphony, an Indian Multi-National Company with presence in over 60 countries is the world’s largest manufacturer of air-coolers. From inventions to innovations, energy responsibility to environment stewardship, Symphony is a market leader which has been cooling customers for generations. The massive supremacy of Symphony coolers in the residential, industrial, and commercial segments has made the brand synonymous with ‘cooling’. Founded in 1988, in Gujarat, India, Symphony Limited established a new category of evaporative air-cooling in India, taking it to the globe. As a disruptor of a highly unorganized sector, the company has set high benchmarks comprising 201 trademarks, 64 registered designs, 15 copyrights and 48 patents, defining the gold standard of air cooling. Symphony Limited is a publicly traded company delivering value to its stakeholders in the most profitable and effective way. 

Teach For India Celebrates India’s Most Impactful Education Organizations On March 24-27, 2021

InnovatED, Teach For India’s national platform which incubates its education entrepreneur Alumni, will hold its Launchpad Summit from 24-27 March 2021 at the Ancient School of Wisdom, Devanahalli, Bengaluru. InnovatED is designed to support Alumni early-stage education entrepreneurs that are looking to convert their innovations from a prototype stage to a sustainable organization. The incubator program provides a plethora of resources for edu-preneurs; funding, dedicated coaches, innovation bootcamps, a peer-led community of support, access to the larger ecosystem and a knowledge framework on organisation-building. The 2020 cohort works across multiple areas of education, right from curriculum to empowerment. 

About 77% of Teach For India Fellowship’s Alumni continue to work in the social sector with 34% working directly on-ground with children, 31% work in pathways linked to education, 12% work with the government in jobs that impact children and 14% go on to work in the private sector across diverse fields yet staying connected to children and the larger mission. While the Fellows support 32,000 children, Teach For India Alumni are reaching 33 million children across India - that’s 1 in 10 of India’s children. 

Entrepreneur bios: 

In Bangalore, Shekar Hariharan founded the Shifting Orbits Foundation, which addresses the issue of inter-generational poverty. Most times, poverty is caused by the inability of low-income families to sustain their children's educational journey and Shifting Orbits Foundation works at a micro level to address this problem.  

Catalyst, founded by Ashna Mehta is aimed at improving science instruction in Government and budget private schools in Hyderabad through teacher kits, handbooks, and instruction aids. 

Learning Initiatives for India founded by Raman Bahl works on creating voice based academic systems for children in Purkhas Rathi, near Ganaur, Haryana. LII works with 30 families that use these voice lessons every day, ensuring education reaches areas without the internet.  

Akshay V, the founder of Edzola works to bridge the technology gap amidst not-for-profits. With surveys to analyse digital literacy, Edzola makes customized reports with recommendations on how to automate processes.  

Through Aikaarth Foundation in Hyderabad, Pooja Agarwal works towards providing government and low-income school children access to arts education.  

Sai Pramod Bathena’s Alokit empowers educational leaders to create improved school systems and increase student outcomes. Before starting Alokit, Sai worked at India School Leadership Institute where he assisted in setting up their school leadership programme in Telangana.  

Sathyanand S’s Aurasky Academy empowers at-risk children to leverage no-code tools and platforms.  

Shreya Krishnan, through The Better Design Foundation (TBDF) aims to create equitable development opportunities for the underserved through human-centered design in Bangalore.  

Udaan, founded by Sohaib Beg through Udaan envisions building 21st-century skills by developing and partnering with community members using curriculum based on leadership framework in Mumbai.  

“Over 7% of our Alumni start their own social impact organisations, a majority of them in education alone. The two year Fellowship builds a deep understanding of education, pedagogy and community in our Fellows and our Entrepreneurs often start solving the problems that they experienced during their own Fellowship. InnovatED helps our Alumni navigate the first tricky years of the entrepreneurship journey, helping them build and grow their organisations. The unique incubation program offers specialised toolkits, opportunities to learn from industry experts, coaching and mentorship, access to the ecosystem and funding support.” - Payoshni Saraf, Alumni Impact Director, Teach For India. 

The event will take place with all the necessary COVID-19 restrictions in place.  

About Teach For India  

Teach For India’s Fellowship program places outstanding working professionals and college graduates as Fellows - who work full-time as teachers for two years in low-income and under-resourced schools. Post Fellowship, they join a growing movement of over 3400+ Alumni working at all levels of the education sector. A part of a global Teach For All network of 59 countries, with a shared vision of an excellent education for all children, Teach For India’s mission is to end educational inequity in India by creating a strong pipeline of driven, skilled talent within the educational ecosystem.

Nutanix Appoints Steve Dixon As Enterprise Sales Director - APJ 105

Nutanix, a leader in private cloud, hybrid and multicloud computing has announced that Steve Dixon has joined the company as Enterprise Sales Director – APJ 105. 

Based in Singapore, Dixon is responsible for leading Nutanix’ sales to large enterprises, and providing leadership and mentorship to Nutanix’ teams responsible for engagement with the top 105 companies across the Asia-Pacific and Japan region. Dixon will report to Nutanix’ APJ Sales Chief of Staff, Krishna Arani.  

“Steve is a crucial member of our team and his organization will lead strategic discussions with our largest customers, helping them solve problems and achieve better outcomes with our portfolio of solutions. Their IT is no longer a cost centre - it is now a business enabler that can help them transform and drive innovation. We’re thrilled to have Steve on-board to help customers do more than keep the lights on with their IT and achieve their goals,” Krishna Arani, VP/COO, APJ Sales, Nutanix. In the quarter ending 31 October 2020, Nutanix customer count, partner count and average contract value in the APJ region each grew by 22 percent year-on-year.

Dixon has more than 35 years’ IT experience to the role and joined Nutanix from NetApp where he served as senior vice president and general manager for APJ. His prior experience also includes management roles at Rubrik Inc., Riverbed Technology and Cabletron Systems. Steve also started his own company, Kinetica, which was built up over seven years and sold successfully in 2005. In total, he has spent more than three decades living and working in APJ, with two of those based in Australia.

“I am excited to join Nutanix and lead a team focused on helping large enterprises realise the outcomes that can be achieved by using Nutanix’ HCI and private, hybrid and multicloud solutions.  The hybrid cloud and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) markets are expected to grow almost twofold to US$145 billion and almost threefold to US$27.1 billion by 2025, respectively - with Asia Pacific leading the charge as the fastest growing market for hybrid cloud. Hybrid cloud is the ideal IT infrastructure according to 86 percent of respondents in Nutanix third annual Enterprise Cloud Index, with those running hybrid environments more likely to focus on strategic efforts and driving positive business impact. I’m eager to help enterprises embrace these opportunities,” Steve Dixon, Enterprise Sales Director – APJ 105, Nutanix.

ServiceNow To Acquire Intellibot To Help Businesses Automate Any Workflow

* Intellibot brings rich talent and IP to extend automation and RPA capabilities within the Now Platform

ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW), the leading digital workflow company making work, work better for people, today announced it has signed an agreement to acquire Intellibot, a robotic process automation (RPA) company based in Hyderabad, India. Intellibot extends ServiceNow’s core workflow capabilities by helping customers automate repetitive tasks for intelligent, end-to-end automation. ServiceNow intends to build Intellibot's capabilities natively into the Now Platform to enable customers to more easily integrate with both modern and legacy systems to drive productivity and strengthen existing artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) efforts.

“ServiceNow is the platform of platforms for the workflow revolution, offering powerful end-to-end automation capabilities that allow customers to streamline business decisions and unlock new levels of productivity,” said Josh Kahn, SVP of Creator Workflow Products at ServiceNow. “Our customers represent nearly 80 percent of the Fortune 500, and the vast majority are trying to drive automation across a mix of legacy and modern applications. With Intellibot, we will extend ServiceNow’s ability to help customers connect systems so they can easily automate workflows and drive productivity.”

ServiceNow recently delivered the Now Platform Quebec Release to help enterprises accelerate their digital transformation by innovating quickly, being more agile, and operating more productively within a new world of work hastened by COVID. Intellibot will complement these capabilities, extending ServiceNow’s existing AI and ML, integrations, low-code development, process mining, process automation, NLX, chatbot, and virtual agent capabilities.

“We are proud to join forces with ServiceNow as it continues to invest in powerful end-to-end automation capabilities to make the world of work, work better for people,” said Srikanth Vemulapalli, CTO and co-founder of Intellibot. “Our RPA combined with ServiceNow workflows will help businesses better connect disparate systems to accelerate innovation and thrive in a new world of work.”

Expanded footprint in India

This acquisition supports ServiceNow’s broader commitment to the Indian market, which represents one of the company’s fastest growing markets. The company plans to develop two new data center facilities in India by the first quarter of 2022. These new data centers will meet local data residency requirements, form part of ServiceNow’s advanced high-availability architecture, and will continue to support the scalability of the company’s cloud services. India hosts ServiceNow’s second largest research and development center and is a growing talent hub for the organization. ServiceNow plans to double its staff in the country within the next three years.

Intellibot was founded in 2015 by CEO Raghu “Alekh” Barli, CTO Srikanth Vemulapalli, and COO Kushang Moorthy. ServiceNow expects to complete the acquisition of Intellibot in Q2 2021. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

JK Tyre Rating Upgraded To “IND A / Stable” By India Ratings And Research (Ind-Ra)

India Ratings and Research (Ind-Ra) has upgraded JK Tyre & Industries Limited’s (JKTIL) Long-Term Issuer Rating to ‘IND A/ Stable’.

The rating upgrade and stable outlook reflects, JK Tyre’s strong operating performance in FY21 on the strength of strong demand from replacement, OEM and export markets, higher operating efficiencies, leaner cost structure and focus on better working capital management, which has resulted in higher cash accruals leading to debt reduction by more than Rs.1,000 crore.

The company has also resorted to aggressive marketing by expanding the dealer network and brand shops in the current financial year to cater to high rural and suburb demand.

Ind-Ra expects tyre demand to sustain following a double-digit percentage increase in OEM and replacement demand. Ind-Ra expects that the initiatives taken by Company – OEM thrust, portfolio premiumisation, exports and launch of the ‘smart’ tyre segment - will enhance revenues, profitability and a sustained reduction in net leverage in FY22..

Snapdeal Launches e-Store For This Holi Festival Across India

Snapdeal – India’s leading value e-commerce marketplace today announced the launch of its Holi store running offers with upto 70% off on festival essentials such as colours, water guns and pichkaris, inflatable pools, readymade food items like dry fruits and sweet packs.

The store is designed for easy shopping experience and lists products in three main categories including top sellers, party essentials and home care products. While offering an expanded range of products at multiple value price points, the e- store provides an experience similar to shopping in a local bazaar to its users.

“Given the upbeat mood of the nation on the back of  the vaccine drive, for the first time since the pandemic perhaps, people are looking forward to celebrating  cautiously with their loved ones.  This year Snapdeal’s Holi store is designed to include more fun and we have worked with local manufacturers and sellers to include a wide variety of items including waterproof speakers, holi theme party items like hats, streamers, balloons and t-shirts. ” said Snapdeal spokesperson.

Snapdeal is also running discounted prices on protective covers for cars and furniture- so that nothing comes in between its users and holi fun. As Holi ushers in the summer season, apparel including kurtis, kidswear and men’s wear is now available at 60-70% discounted rate starting Rs 199 . Additionally, users can avail additional discount of 25% Instant Discount to shoppers using IDBI credit cards with no minimum transaction limit.

Other items available on offer include a wide range of skincare essentials such as aloe vera gels, sunscreens and oils and home cleaning products like magic mops, window sprays, cleaning cloths, gloves and disposable bags.

About Snapdeal

Snapdeal is India’s leading value-focused marketplace with more than 500,000 registered sellers and 213 million-plus listings on the marketplace. More than 70 million users visit Snapdeal every month to browse and buy from their vast catalogue.

Snapdeal plays a significant role in the development of India’s e-commerce sector, especially in tier 2 and tier 3 cities. Snapdeal’s focus is on providing a deep assortment of value-priced merchandise that has enabled e-commerce to grow beyond branded products and urban consumers.