40% of property searches in India are done on mobile, 4x more than last year

At the beginning of last year, 10 percent of property searches in India were made though mobile devices. By May, this figure stood at 40 percent, according to data shared by IndiaProperty. Mobile search is growing three times faster than desktop, as shown in the infographic below.

Gone are the days when property buyers had to rely on brokers or word-of-mouth from friends and family or classified ads in newspapers. Online portals like SoftBank-backed Housing, Google Capital-backed CommonFloor, and Bertelsmann-backed IndiaProperty have transformed the landscape. Photographs, maps, and even augmented reality have made it both fun and efficient to search for a new home or apartment through websites and mobile apps.

The big shift to mobile has happened over the past year and a half, as people in the smaller towns of India get connected to the internet mostly via smartphones. The boom in affordable smartphones is giving it a push. Real estate search via mobile in second-tier cities of India is growing 30 percent faster than the national average.

Not surprisingly, yuppies are among the most active property searchers on mobile. More intriguing is that women outnumber men in this space.