Land and property demand up in SL, says Lamudi
Kian Moini
With fast moving technology and increasing wide spread of Internet and mobile phone penetration in Sri Lanka, online real estate platform ‘Lamudi’ has reached out to 22 million (local and foreign) potential clients seeking real estate properties, says Kian Moini, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Lamudi. On a two-day visit to Sri Lanka, Mr. Moini in an exclusive interview with Business Times at the Lamudi office in Colombo, said that the demand is more than the supply ie. – people seeking houses for rent or purchase is significantly higher than those who want to sell or rent their properties.
In Sri Lanka people who offer real estate is limited. People who are potentially searching for real estate properties have grown to 22 million in two years since the inception of Lamudi in Sri Lanka in early 2014. Among them, foreigners searching for real estate properties in Sri Lanka are rapidly increasing, he added while mentioning that Sri Lanka is a very attractive market compared to other countries in the region. Sri Lanka is seeing more foreigners visiting the country which is encouraging Foreign Direct Investment. When more foreigners come and invest, prices of properties will go up, he noted.
People are searching for every single category of real estate properties in different price ranges in Sri Lanka. Colombo and Kandy being the most popular areas, the total search volume is spread in similar distribution as the income levels, given the fact that Internet penetration is stronger in this population, he added. On the distribution of Lamudi web search by different age groups, he said, traffic is generated through google and facebook to a large extent. Facebook users around the world on highest average are between 25 to 30 years of age.
They are typically the ones looking for urbanization, getting married and looking for real estate properties. There is a trend which shows that this is moving towards the mid and older generation where the search behaviors are changing. The older people go online, get more acquainted, play around, do performance search and make inquiries. Education or self-education of the entire population leads to not only browsing the Internet but make use of the Internet in a way that benefits themselves. For those who do not have access to Internet, Lamudi has the ‘dial for home’
service. “We want Lamudi to be accessible not only for people who have Internet, but for those who are used to telephone calls to inquire on various property information,” added Mr. Moini.
He also very proudly stressed on the fact that Lamudi team in Sri Lanka is one of the smartest out of the 32 countries that the company is present worldwide. “People in Sri Lanka are smart and want to progress further to achieve their ambition. It is a very good recipe for a developing country like Sri Lanka. You even see that in economic figures whether it’s the GDP growth, per capita income, also in terms of the internet and smart phone penetration rate.” On further investments and the company’s expansion in Sri Lanka Mr. Moini elaborated that it is very unlikely that Lamudi would significantly spend and get into new markets this year. “If we are expanding it would be rather countries where we see very strong network effect,” he noted.