Enabling smarter real-estate transactions- Startups bring property due diligence up to speed

Enabling smarter real-estate transactions: Startups bring property due diligence up to speed

More than two-thirds of the cases pending in different courts across the country are related to land disputes. Verifying a land ownership document or obtaining an encumbrance certificate — a key document demonstrating that a property has a clear and marketable title, free from any economic or legal liabilities – can be a time-consuming endeavour, typically requiring multiple trips to the respective state’s land revenue department to access and authenticate the necessary records.Hyderabad-based Landeed claims to streamline this process by offering swift access to these documents. The proptech venture, started in 2022, has developed its unique property title search engine that empowers users to perform unlimited searches for a fixed monthly fee. Users can input property details and gain instant access to all pertinent documents, including maps, from various departments.Through its app, Landeed equips individuals, landowners, legal advisors, real estate professionals, and organisations to navigate property ownership complexities. With over three million installations on iOS and Android devices, this proptech startup has achieved significant user adoption. It now covers property documents from over 20 states.Data for smarter decisionsFrom real-time connectivity tracking to building the information module on cloud now, and layering it with property intelligence and analytics through Big Data, proptech startups have come a long way, said Govind Mundhra, founding general partner at Paradigm Shift Capital. “Startups are now using geofencing, embedded sensors, drone based mapping for accurate land parcel configurations, and AI/LLM-based chat interfaces allow customers to seek answers to a variety of customer questions. We’re also seeing adoption of simulation engineering and virtual reality for diverse applications and use cases.”Kritika Murugesan, senior director, Nasscom Startups, said, “Deeptech’s integration in real estate and proptech is redefining the future of property landscapes, catalysing innovation to simplify processes and create smarter, more sustainable, and interconnected spaces that revolutionise how we live, work, and interact with our environments.” According to her, startups in the real estate domain are likely to be the next big thing as they are driving growth of a sustainable ecosystem in India. Tech startups in this segment are expanding their horizons with innovations ranging from blockchain-driven property transactions ensuring transparency and security to data-driven insights facilitating more informed investment decisions.Landeed goes beyond simplifying property title checks, offering automated property reports and legal opinions through the app, further streamlining property transactions, said founder and CEO Sanjay Mandava. Users can enter specific details such as the survey number, and Landeed provides access to a government-issued encumbrance certificate (EC) for the property. “This EC is a comprehensive document covering current ownership details and delving into the property’s ownership history spanning upto 20 to 25 years. It’s a valuable tool for property buyers, sellers, and anyone involved in real estate transactions, offering a wealth of information to guide their decisions,” he said.Furthermore, the startup provides sale deeds and help with registering properties for its users along with facilitating the retrieval of property tax information and other essential property details, making it a one-stop platform for all property-related inquiries and checks. It has secured more than $10 million in funding, paving the way for further expansion and innovation in the proptech sphere.Delving into land recordsLandeed is not the only one in this field. Bengaluru-based startup, Terra Economics and Analytics Lab (TEAL) is working on digitising property due diligence in India. Backed by venture capital from InfoEdge and Omidyar Network, TEAL’s core product is a digital platform to conduct property due diligence in real-time for banks, housing finance companies (notably HDFC, ICICI, Axis Bank, Aadhaar Housing Finance, Bajaj Finserv and Muthoot Fincorp), and individual buyers and sellers .“When my co-founders, Rohan Shridhar, Shreyas Murali and I started TEAL in 2018, we wondered why despite more than three decades of efforts at digitisation of land records nationally and across different states, buyers or lenders checking title of properties in India still relied on physical, offline modes of diligence. We found that while a lot of historical records for land and property across states were scanned, they were often inaccessible or inscrutable for ordinary citizens,”  said Kshitij Batra, CEO and co-founder, TEAL.

TEAL has data on real estate assets for 14 states. The firm today processes close to one-fifth of all home loans and loan against property applications across India. Its flagship digital property search report provides comprehensive legal due diligence within three hours for individual properties and land parcels with only the address as an input.  “We are trying to make property information easily accessible and standardised for lending institutions and individual buyers and sellers,” said Batra.On the government efforts towards digitisation of land records, he added: “Digitisation of land records is a base digital infrastructure that the government is building. It can then serve as the foundational data layer on a stack on which other applications can be built by proptech and fintech firms such as TEAL.