Zameen.com has been operating, for quite some time now, as an established industry leader. It was the first website of its kind in Pakistan back in 2006, when it launched, and the company has been a trendsetter in ushering new, real-estate-facilitating developments and services — both online and on the ground — to the industry ever since.
The prop-tech giant has just debuted its latest feature, called Plot Finder: a tool that allows users to access digital, geo-coded maps of 2,500+ housing societies across Pakistan — corresponding to a total of 1.2 million plot and housing units in 38 cities.
A significant feat; no matter how you look at it, and particularly when you consider all the other search-based utilities currently on offer to real estate seekers.
This tool represents an innovation with the potential to bring about a greater, functional shift for Pakistan’s real estate sector. An event, perhaps, similar in effective scale to the one brought about by the very rise of an e-commerce website in the country.
This piece covers this development and details everything you need to know about this new – and most importantly, free – public facility introduced by Zameen.com; which is almost guaranteed to become part and parcel of the country’s real estate market in a very short time, given the tremendous ease of doing business it brings.
So what exactly is Plot Finder?
Basically, Plot Finder comprises an inventory of digital, geo-coded maps which provide the exact locations of plots situated in 2,500 major residential societies across the country.
This tool, although being a boon for serious real estate investors and genuine buyers (people interested in taking up property for their personal use), will prove to be particularly beneficial for property agents.
These professionals, as part of their daily working obligations, need to constantly share plot details, through SMS and online descriptions etc. with their clients. These textual depictions, however, always fall short of presenting a property’s full picture. This new technological breakthrough solves this problem by enabling agents to share the exact location of a plot with their clients through a simple, online share.
It is also important to note that Plot Finder isn’t simply a map.
If you’re a realtor looking to sell a number of plots in a housing project, you can use satellite maps of plots across 38 cities in Pakistan, and organize them together in a personalised collection based on a potential buyer’s requirements.
The collections feature will not only enable property agents to share personalized collections as per the client’s need, it also provides an added value to agents as they can manage the available plots inventory in Plot Finder collection, along with the demand prices instead of managing them on paper or text messages and share it amongst their colleagues.
Clients can also use this particular feature to conveniently share information regarding their selected properties with their friends and family; in order to gauge their interest. Moreover, this tool provides access to a comprehensive list of further details like plot numbers, plot addresses, map locations, plot sizes (in marlas and kanals) and plot types (residential, commercial, industrial).
Plot Finder, as such, joins the ranks of Zameen’s other similar market innovations; like Zameen’s Pakistan Real Estate Price Index — which has no parallel in the country’s online property field.
What makes Plot Finder different?
Plot Finder is clearly another first in a global market evolution that has often been termed as the Internet Real Estate shift. In time, it is quite likely that people will want to buy a plot, a house, or a shop through the internet — without having to visit the actual property until after it has been bought and is ready to be moved into. In Pakistan, it is not too wild to imagine that this tool can fan the spread of this trend further.
Practically speaking, the users of this service will be able to attain instantaneous access to digital housing society maps; allowing them to retrieve much more accurate information about the actual state and size of a particular plot in a manner that wasn’t achievable before.
Currently, for example, if you are looking for a plot, you will either have to visit a property agent or log on to a site like Zameen to scour your options. But if you want to find out more about the property’s exact dimensions and its relative positioning within a particular housing society, you will eventually have to visit the property site.
By debuting Plot Finder, Zameen.com has considerably decreased the length of the property-searching experience.
On What the Future May Hold…
The future potential of the product is even more encouraging to contemplate.
It could, for one, be further refined to provide even more property site information through the incorporation of virtual reality into its framework; thereby taking the real estate sorting experience in Pakistan to a newer, game-changing level.
One thing is for certain, however, because it has come directly from the horse’s mouth: Zameen.com’s senior management said at a press conference held to launch the new tool that the mapping process would continue until all of Pakistan is covered.
