Indian gate management platforms like MyGate, and NoBrokerHood, have the potential to capture a total addressable market worth $35 billion-$40 billion through brand engagement, social/hyperlocal commerce, and real estate solutions, according to internet-focused consulting firm RedSeer.
Digital adoption
A growing need for security solutions and quick digital adoption have led to the increased use of gate management platforms in India, also reflecting in the growth numbers of these platforms. NoBrokerHood, launched in 2019, has reported 10x growth after the pandemic
“We have gone from working with 700-800 gated communities in early 2020 to 11,000 societies today across Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, Delhi – NCR, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Nagpur, Jaipur and Kochi,” Co-founder and CTO of NoBroker.com, Akhil Gupta, told BusinessLine .
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Similarly, community management platform MyGate claims to have grown 4X in the past 20 months. From working with 6,000 societies in March 2020, MyGate has now onboarded 25,000 communities and the number of homes has grown 3.5X from 1 million to 3.5 million.
“While the vast majority of our societies are in the major metros, we did see inbound interest from smaller cities and towns in the pandemic, too. As a result, you can find MyGate in Jaipur, Indore, Lucknow, Raipur etc,” said Abhishek Kumar, COO and Co-founder of MyGate.
Covid impact
Both platforms have seen a shift in gated communities’ willingness to work with community management platforms post the pandemic. Gupta noted that Covid-19 pushed gated communities to trace the movement of people in the society along with temperature checks, vaccinations etc, and NoBrokerHood’s integration with Aarogya Setu, temperature checks, vaccination status helped with the digital adoption of societies. Further, MyGate saw an increase in usage of many of its community features such as communications, resident calling, and notice boards.
MyGate holds up to 82 per cent market share in the community management space, followed by NoBrokerHood (13-15 per cent) and others (3-7 per cent). Currently, 25 per cent of the 16 million homes in gated communities are estimated to have gate management solutions.
Increasing market size
RedSeer’s analysis shows that although comprising just 32 per cent of the population in India’s top-50 cities, gated communities account for 45 per cent of overall spend. The report also noted that the role of gated communities in India’s consumption story will go from significant to critical in just five years. This is because such communities are projected to host 24 million households by 2026, a 50 per cent increase over the current 16 million households.
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Total consumption in Indian gated communities is expected to increase by 2.5x in five years, reaching $500 billion. The rise in these households will also be complemented by an increase in annual spending, up from the present $13,000- $14,000 to $19,000- $20,000 in a five-year span.
Integrated services
To capture the growing consumption in Indian gated communities, community management platforms have also launched various commerce features. For instance, MyGate has launched a Home Services vertical where users can book pest control and painting services among other services.About a third of MyGate’s active users are said to browse the selection on a weekly basis and has already emerged as a major revenue channel for the company.
In September, MyGate had launched a property marketplace — MyGate Homes — which is said to have seen close to 12,000 listings and have connected over 40,000 buyers/tenants to homeowners.
“We have also built partnerships to offer integrated services such as digital rent agreement with e-signing, legal assistance, movers and packers and property management and provide one-click listing on Housing.com via an exclusive partnership,” said Kumar.
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NoBrokerHOOD has come up with an explore feature which allows residents to buy and sell used items, list houses for rent, among other things. This feature is said to have seen about 1,000 items being posted every day on the explore feed.
The company is working on launching new features like neighbourhood stores which will allow nearby stores to list on NoBrokerHOOD app and enable society residents to start buying from the platform. This will also allow residents to list their small businesses and start selling from the app.
