Just like you enter the mobile showroom to buy phone, laptop showroom to buy laptop, now get ready to enter a real estate showroom to buy a property of your choice. High street real estate boutiques will be first of its kind ever in India.

DELHI BASED real estate management and advisory firm, Better Options Property (BOP) has drawn up an ambitious project to set up a chain of 15 real estate boutiques across various North Indian cities and in Delhi NCR. A high street real estate shoppe based on the model of a walk-in store for property consultancy and purchase, the real estate boutiques will be first of its kind ever in India. Titled, ‘BOP studio’, each shoppe will have sit-in consultants for detailed and free counseling to every walk in customer. The studio will be centrally air-conditioned with the ambience of a high-end store showcasing various projects across various North Indian cities from which the customers can choose from. It shall have customer friendly trained professionals to interact with advise seeking people complete with coffee, snacks, lounge space, project viewing on large screen television and experts to answer frequently asked questions (FAQs).

Gaurav Mavi, director, BOP, says, “You could walk-in, avail our free real estate consultancy and still not buy any of the properties being showcased. It is a unique concept where we want to bring consumer durable shopping experience to real estate buyers. We expect people to perceive BOP as a real estate consultant than a mere property seller.”

BOP, a fast growing real estate advisory firm, is competing with several overseas real estate management firms like Knight Frank and Hines and is trying hard to innovate. Real estate advisory is a relatively new segment in India where firms like BOP are fast emerging as the market determinants in terms of pricing and inventory for large residential projects. BOP which has sold 10,000 flats in one financial year is by far the largest real estate advisory firm in India, today, by sheer volume of sales. In the current financial year the company has handled a whopping Rs 5,000 crore worth of property sales and aiming still higher Rs 10,000 crore next financial year. The sales figures of BOP outstrip the total annual sales of the largest construction companies in Delhi.

The concept of ‘BOP studio’ throws up some interesting facts. Sample this:

•Each studio would entail an initial investment of Rs 60 lakh onwards towards the infrastructure alone
•The studios would be a 2000 sq feet outlet on the high street at prime location in each city.
•BOP Studios is being planned in the following cities in North India: Jaipur, Lucknow, Agra, Kanpur, Ludhiana, Chandigarh, Amritsar, Noida, Meerut etc.
•BOP shall directly employ twenty five people for servicing studio which is expected to take its current staff strength to close to a thousand professionals.

BOP is partnering up with large local real estate developers through a marketing joint venture where it shall sell the entire inventory of the builder through one window. Most of the city based builders in tier two towns do not have cutting edge marketing skills and hence lose out to the larger pan Indian real estate firms in project selling in their own home cities. BOP has identified this as an excellent entry level opportunity in small cities.

“We are creating shoppes and trying to leverage on scales by taking up large projects in the respective cities,” says Gaurav Mani, director BOP. “Real estate buyers in tier two cities are still not exposed to professionally guided buying experience. Through these high street shoppes we are trying to bring in a whole new experience in real estate buying.”

BOP has set an ambitious breakeven target for the BOP studios. It shall have to handle at least ten projects annually in each city of operation. And achieve a sales of Rs 150 crore per city per year to make its studios be profitable. These statistics makes the financial engagements look tough indeed. Particularly for tier two cities where, average realisation from residential projects is still pretty much lower than metros, the BOP Studios would have a tough call achieving the projected revenue figures.

Gaurav Mani says, “We know that our pan India expansion through the shoppe concept may not yield us profit too soon. But then, the BOP shoppe is the only way to establish a real estate advisory firm – a category of industry which is yet to take off in India.”