Housing introduces 'Routing', to enable house search based on commute times

Housing.com, the real estate platform, has announced the launch of ‘Routing’, a feature that allows the consumers to search for a home based on commute time or on-road distance from any specific establishment like a school, workplace, hospital, railway station etc.Targeted for buy and sell category, this feature is currently live on the website and available for home seekers in Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Kolkata and Delhi-NCR.Housing.com has introduced ‘Routing’ with a special focus towards home seekers who are new to a city and might be unaware of the geographies and demographics in different localities. Its time algorithm quality assumes average traffic during post office evening hours where mode of commute is by road. Post the soft launch a week ago the website has witnessed almost 40 percent surge in engagement (properties viewed per user) and 60 percent increase in conversions for buy in establishment searches, says the company. Housing.com currently receives approx. 2 lakh unique visitors on monthly basis.Commenting on the new feature, Snehil Buxy, Chief Product Officer, Housing.com said, “Our focus is to solve the pain points in home buying and selling in the real estate segment and bring convenience to the consumers. During our research, we realised that almost 30% of all searches in the real estate industry come from users who are not certain about the locality they want to live in. We are confident that ‘Routing’ will bring forth a new intuitive form of home search and ease the process of buying and selling for consumers.”When consumers are searching for a property through landmark input, they could specify the commute time from that landmark. Post this, the website will show a list of those properties that are within the requested time limit.Additionally, the consumers could also specify their preferred distance from the landmark and the website will then showcase only those properties which are listed within the specified parameters.Developed in-house, ‘Routing’ was conceived during Hackathon, a 30-hour coding event at Housing.com.Late last month, Housing.com had also announced that it had secured a fresh round of funding from Softbank, its largest investor amounting to Rs. 100 crore. The company had said that the infusion would well-capitalize the company to drive its new strategy and growth plans.