Real estate: one inventory, one truth, one collection schedule

The single most valuable thing we build for a developer is an inventory system that is genuinely live and genuinely singular. Every unit has a state — available, held, blocked, booked, agreement executed, registered — with rules governing transitions, expiry on holds, and authorisation on blocks.

Every channel reads from it: the site sales team, the corporate office, channel partners through their portal, and the customer-facing availability display. A hold placed by a broker in Salt Lake is visible immediately to the sales team at the site. Holds expire automatically unless extended by someone authorised, which eliminates the practice of units being informally blocked indefinitely.

Alongside availability, the pricing structure: base rate, floor rise, PLC for view or corner, parking, and the various charges that make a real price different from a headline rate. Quotations generate from this automatically, which removes both the calculation time and the errors that arise when a salesperson does it manually.

Most residential sales in Indian metros come through channel partners, and the commercial relationship generates a recurring dispute: who introduced this customer, and therefore whose commission is it. Without a system, it is resolved by argument and relationship.

We build attribution properly: customer registration by the partner before or at first visit, with a validity window and a clear rule for what happens when two partners claim the same customer. Site visit logging with the partner recorded. And a commission calculation that follows the agreed structure including slabs and bonuses, with a statement the partner can see.

The effect is twofold. Disputes largely disappear because the record is unambiguous. And partner productivity improves — clients report around forty per cent — because partners can see live inventory, generate quotations, register customers and track their own commission without calling the office.

Construction-linked payment plans mean that a demand note becomes due when a physical milestone is achieved. In practice, the site knows the slab was cast and finance finds out days or weeks later, which delays the demand and therefore the cash.

We connect them. Construction progress recorded at site — with photographic evidence — triggers the milestone, which generates demand notes for every applicable unit automatically, with the correct amounts and taxes, delivered to customers by email and WhatsApp with a payment link.

Follow-up then runs on an automated ladder, escalating to the collections team only for genuine defaults. Across our deployments collection ageing has improved by around a third, which on a project of any size is a substantial working-capital effect.

The most useful single chart in a development is physical progress and financial progress plotted together. Divergence between them is the earliest signal of trouble — physical ahead of financial means cash is being consumed faster than collected; financial ahead of physical means the project is behind and customers will notice.

We build this from actual data: progress recorded against a work breakdown structure at site, and financial progress from the collections and expenditure ledgers. For contractors and EPC firms the same structure drives progress billing, with claims generated from measured work and supported by the measurement records.

Subcontractor management sits alongside: work orders, measurement books, running account bills, retention, and reconciliation of material issued against work certified — an area where leakage is common and rarely measured.

A customer who has committed to a purchase enters a long period — often two to four years — during which their primary experience of the developer is uncertainty. They cannot see progress, they are not sure what they owe, and getting an answer requires a phone call to someone who may not know.

A customer portal changes this entirely: construction progress with photographs, their payment schedule and what has been paid, documents, and the ability to raise a query with a tracked response. Clients report over ninety per cent of routine customer queries moving to self-service, which frees a customer relations team to handle the ones that genuinely need a person.

It also has a measurable commercial effect. Customers who feel informed refer more and complain less, and referral is one of the most efficient acquisition channels in residential real estate.

RERA reporting obligations — quarterly project updates, escrow account discipline, and the specific disclosures required — are an ongoing administrative task that is usually compiled manually from several sources.

We generate the required data from operational records: units sold and available, collections received, construction progress, and the financial position of the designated account. This turns a quarterly compilation exercise into a report, and it also reduces the risk of an inconsistency between what is filed and what the operational records show.