Housing’s sister firm IREF sets up news wing to help publicize corruption in Indian realty

The IREF team

The Indian real estate industry is notorious for rampant corruption, malpractice, and delays. There have been several disturbing instances where developers have permission to construct a building up to the seventh floor, and yet are selling eighth and ninth floor homes to buyers. According to real estate advisory firm Jones Lang Lasalle, India scores the lowest in the world on transparency of its transaction processes due to weak professional standards for local agents.

To stop people from being cheated, Housing’s sister firm Indian Real Estate Forum (IREF), a community platform to provide reviews of property, is setting up a news wing. (Housing and IREF share the same parent company).

“The news wing will not tread lightly on matters that need to be spoken about aloud,” IREF CEO Ravish Naresh told Tech in Asia.

Housing has a data collection team of over hundred members and a due diligence service arm called Realty Business Intelligence (Realty BI) which will help IREF. “We don’t need to place our people on street and can directly leverage the live and updated data from the ground,” says Naresh.

IREF aims to become the TripAdvisor of real estate in a push for transparency. “Distinguishing good from bad or better options is extremely challenging in the property market. Clarity about what’s exactly on offer is a scarce good. Background information on properties is often biased and fragmented. Reliable hallmarks or yardsticks don’t exist. As a result property research and investigation is a stressful process,” said Naresh, who wants to make the industry transparent.

Putting sticks together

The IREF division was launched about three months ago through an acquisition. “When we acquired IREF, the site was loading at a snail’s pace; our new users were dropping off like flies. The first priority was to rectify this. Now, the page load time is reduced by half,” said Naresh.

The 65 member team is now engaged in making sense of the abundant knowledge on IREF. Right now, all the insights are scattered so its ninja techies are tagging information location, builder, and project-wise for users to create navigation and custom search.

“We have built a gamified tagging interface – IREF_Turks – where we use conditional random fields which when given a sentence would tell you what words are the real estate entities – builders, locations, and projects. This problem is also called Named Entity Recognition (NER), and has been tackled by many but mainly on formal, structured text. We’re trying this for IREF – where most of the information is informal and noisy. Despite this, we’ve already achieved a three quarter accuracy in identifying locations and are striving for much more,” explained Naresh.

IREF has also launched a mobile app and made its website design more mobile-responsive.

But the real question is: are these initiatives a prelude to integrating reviews of location, builder, and project on Housing? Naresh played coy: “Can’t lay down all our cards on the table, can we? Let’s wait and watch.”

Meanwhile, this development comes just weeks after former Housing CEO Rahul Yadav’s attempt to have “fun” by sending mixed responses to journalists on the speculation of the company being in talks to get acquired by classifieds firm Quikr. Yadav was eventually fired by the investors of the company.