Virtual reality is the future. It has applications in therapy, sports, medicine, education, fashion, and a variety of other fields. Recently, it has entered the realm of real estate, and today, this entry was only reinforced with the acquisition of AI-based platform PropVR by proptech platform Square Yards. PropVR specializes in creating digital property experiences using 3D technologies, virtual reality, and augmented reality.
What is its application in real estate? PropVR, founded by Srinath Kandala and Sunder Jagannathan, converts any floor plan or physical space into an interactive 3D walkthrough. This will help property developers, real estate agents, architects, and interior designers to virtually showcase the properties to their clients using immersive 3D walkthroughs and inbuilt video conferencing solutions.
The pandemic has done much harm, but if there is one sector that has profited, it is the market for 3D, VR, and AR visualizations. Real estate companies spend a significant amount of budget in time in helping their customers and stakeholders visualize their property spaces. The acquisition of PropVR will give Square Yards an edge over its competitors.
The acquisition of PropVR marks the third one by Square Yards in recent times, following the acquisition of rental and property management platform Azuro and real estate asset management platform PropsAMC.
In a press release, Tanuj Shori, Founder and CEO of Square Yards, said, “With PropVR, we are not only looking to redefine the digital real estate experiences for our customers, agents, and property developers but, in the long term, we want to digitize and index the built world by creating the digital twins of every single organized property in India.”
The acquisition would mean that the founders of PropVR would be joining Square Yards in senior leadership roles. Additionally, PropVR’s existing investors, including realty developer Brigade Group’s Real Estate Accelerator Programme (REAP), have also become co-investors in Square Yards.
The acquisition is also expected to support Square Yards’ stack of real estate services from search and discovery, transactions, mortgages, interiors, rentals, property management, and post-sales services.
PropVR, whose proprietary technology has won numerous awards for its innovation in visualization technology and services in the proptech space, can cut the real estate marketing expenditure by 80% while simultaneously increasing the customer engagement levels by up to 400%.
Square Yards also plans to launch new 3D experiences on its portal squareyards.com where users can search, explore and navigate the entire real estate landscape of a city in a 3D environment. It also plans to showcase real-time inventory availability and enable end-to-end transactions on this platform going forward.
Square Yards registered a sequential growth of 30% in consolidated revenue at Rs 89.2 crore for the winter quarter, making it the best quarter ever for the firm in terms of revenue. The top line also rose over 12% from a year ago, driven mainly by the international property and NRI segments.
According to estimates provided by Goldman Sachs, the VR and AR markets in real estate are expected to reach $80 billion by 2015. Companies like Matterport which provides 3D visualizations of physical spaces using cameras have gone public with a valuation of over $3 billion.
