A real estate portal is a website or app that lists homes for sale or rent, so that buyers and tenants can search them before they call an owner or a broker. It is also called a property portal or a property website. Each advertisement for one home is called a listing. A listing gives the price or the rent, the area in square feet, the number of bedrooms, photographs and the location.
Take, for example, a software engineer who has just moved to Hyderabad for a new job. She wants a 2BHK flat to rent near Gachibowli, for ₹25,000 to ₹30,000 a month. She sets these filters on the portal, and it shows 140 matching listings on a map. She shortlists six and taps "Contact owner" on three of them. The portal sends her phone number to each owner, and two of them call her back the same evening. She visits both flats on Saturday and pays the deposit for one of them.
Who lists homes on a portal? Three kinds of advertisers: owners, brokers, and builders who are selling flats in a new project. Brokers and builders pay the portal for each listing or for a monthly plan. A builder may also pay to show its project at the top of the search results. The buyer or tenant usually pays nothing. Each enquiry from a buyer or tenant is called a lead. Brokers receive their leads in their brokerage software.
Some Indian portals let owners and tenants deal directly, with no broker in between, so that neither side pays a broker's commission. In big Indian cities, that commission is often one month's rent. Such a portal earns instead from paid plans for owners and tenants, and from services such as rental agreements and packers and movers. Whether a platform only lists other people's homes, or also handles the deal itself, is a version of the marketplace vs inventory model question.
For new projects, Indian portals also show the project's RERA registration number. Under RERA, the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016, builders must register most new projects with the state's RERA authority before they sell any flats.
A portal also connects to the next steps of buying. It may show an estimated price from an automated valuation model. It may offer a home loan, and pass the buyer's details to a lender's loan origination system. Portals must also remove fake listings. A common trick is to post a flat that does not exist and ask tenants for a "token amount" in advance. So portals verify owners' phone numbers, and some send staff to check that the flat is real.