For Graana.com, real estate is about research and trust

The property business in Pakistan works very differently from how it works in the rest of the world. In places like the United Kingdom or the United States, realtors are licensed professionals that work within the bounds of regulations and laws. Property listings are made professionally, and interactive websites dedicated to these listings provide not just pictures and prices, but trustworthy advice, legal assistance, and property inspection services.

In Pakistan, unfortunately, the property business has been a free for all. Self-proclaimed real estate agents and listings websites with limited services mean that the number of people that end up having bad experiences because of such malpractices is significantly higher. There is usually a mountain of paperwork that still ends up missing things, and transactions are generally slow and inefficient. These are exactly the kind of problems that Graana.com, an up and coming Pakistani PropTech company, is hoping to provide solutions to.

The man behind this venture is one Shafiq Akbar, a notable overseas Pakistani, Cambridge alumnus, business magnate, real estate analyst, author, and philanthropist, Graana.com is set for a nationwide launch of its services in the very near future. The pioneering platform will be radically different from existing real estate companies and web portals, and will fully embrace the nuances of the financial technology and PropTech space in a bid to ensure that its customers get safe, secure and hassle free transactions ensuring avoidance of all kind of malpractices in the real estate business.

Origins

There is no real be-all-end-all answer to what exactly PropTech (Property Technology) constitutes. Essentially, however, it is a reflection of how all financial institutions and businesses are beginning to rely more heavily on technology. In Pakistan, the trend has generally been slow to pick up, and has completely failed to take off with regards to real estate until now. This gap is where Shafiq Akbar first saw an opportunity.

 “We are going to introduce the most advanced systems being used in the rest of the world to the property business in Pakistan. Each and every property in the country will geo-tagged during a demographic study being carried out by the company,” Shafiq Akbar tells us in an exclusive interview with Profit. “Take this as an example of how we plan to change things: Nobody in the UK buys or sells property without consulting a lawyer with experience in this field. Through our platform, we will be launching the same system in Pakistan. Because of this, even Overseas Pakistanis can buy and sell property in safe, secure and hassle free transaction – all while sitting abroad.”

For Shafiq, the key word is trust. What he hopes to achieve with Graana.com is a platform where clients can be sure that the property they are either renting, selling or buying is secure, real, vetted, and free from any possible problems that might haunt them for generations. The drive to launch such a platform comes from more than two decades of experience working in the United Kingdom and Pakistan, during which time Shafiq Akbar has delivered over fifty real estate projects and successfully launched businesses in London spanning the length and breadth of the real estate industry.

The understanding and importance of trust comes from Shafiq’s own life as a self-made man. He initially began his career 21 years ago in Pakistan as a young professional with Hyundai Engineering and Construction and worked on several mega projects such as Chashma Hydro-Power Project and Pirkoh Gas Compression Plant. He later on moved to the UK and worked for top brands in financial and real estate industries. After years of delivering excellence across real estate Investment and financial advisory services, Shafiq Akbar ventured into real estate as an entrepreneur. Since then, it has been an upwards trajectory.

Even as he became the go to investment and real estate advisor for the Pakistani diaspora in London, Shafiq’s sights were always back at home, where he wanted to use his skills and decades of experience to improve the real estate market in Pakistan. In 2016, he moved back to Pakistan where he is actively working as the Chairman and Founding CEO of the Imaarat Group of Companies. It was from here that Graana.com also began.

What makes Graana.com different?

There are of course websites that already exist in Pakistan that are in the business of real estate and provide detailed listings. The problem, once again, is that Shafiq felt they were not completely trustworthy since they did not have international practices and standards in place. Graana.com would change this by bringing into play the business transaction model being practiced in western countries. This is what Graana.com calls its ‘conveyance system,’ which will be operational for the first time in Pakistan. What this means is that through this one platform, clients of Graana.com will be able to get access to free legal assistance, basic inspection of property, and other services that are the norm in more developed countries. The Granna.com model is based on how the real estate industry is run in the United Kingdom, where Shafiq has the bulk of his experience.

This is especially attractive to overseas Pakistanis hoping to invest in property back home. You see, most people familiar with the real estate market in Pakistan are very used to the wilderness that is the Pakistani market. Despite this, they are constantly concerned about malpractices, fraud and risks in investing in both housing and commercial projects and schemes in Pakistan. This concern is magnified in overseas Pakistanis that are used to the conventions of a regulated real estate market. Graana.com has come forward to provide safe, transparent property transactions and result-oriented profitable deals for everyone who needed to buy, sell, rent, invest or develop. While Shafiq hopes that this will encourage overseas Pakistanis to be more comfortable doing business in Pakistan, the idea is that it becomes the new standard for Pakistanis at home as well.

“We have been working in Pakistan for the past five years already,” says Shafiq. The Imaarat Group of Companies has been operating in Pakistan for a while now, and it was from here that a deeper understanding of the Pakistani market came. “We have launched various successful projects like Golf Flora, Florence Galleria, Amazon Outlet Mall etc – all of which aim at dealing with the marketing business of projects worth around $ 1 billion by the end of 2021 in the country.” With such projects completed and more in the works, promoting a particular kind of culture in the real estate industry will favour Graana.com in the long run, and be good for people looking to buy, rent, sell, and everything in between.

“This is going to be a one window solution to all property related issues. The valuation of property, its development, and its marketing will all be based on factual data collected through extensive research and usage of technology,” Shafiq explains. “There is no other company that is doing what we are doing, which is what makes us different from our competitors.”

One of the major advantages that Shafiq brings to Graana.com is his expertise in the real estate business. It was his idea to introduce the ‘OADD’ formula to the real estate industry in Pakistan. The OADD formula takes into account a process that looks at Ownership, Approval, Delivery, and Demand – hence the acronym ‘OADD.’ “In my assessment, the last “D” (Demand) missing in the property market in Pakistan. That is because there is no focus on finding out what people want. We need to employ experts, conduct research and surveys,” says Shafiq. “And none of this can be effectively or efficiently done without using technology and modern tools.”

And he is right, there really are no real estate experts in Pakistan. There might be people that have been working in the business for years or even decades, but do they have any qualifications? Do they have a license? “This is a harsh reality, but despite being the second largest employer in Pakistan, the people that hope to become movers and shakers in this industry are thoroughly unqualified because no such qualification is offered in Pakistan,” says Shafiq. “This is why Graana.com, for the first time in Pakistan, is launching a Development Study Certification course at the National University of Science and Technology (NUST).”

Students that pass this course will be among the first batches of real, qualified, realtors in Pakistan, and after passing the course will hit the ground running with the necessary skills and knowledge to handle their clients as they deserve. In developed countries like the UK, people are doing specializations in real estate and providing their services as well. It is a degree of skilled work like a qualification in law. This course is just the beginning, but Shafiq believes that we need to introduce specialized short courses in real estate education, in which the participants can learn about the laws, hospitality, economy and other knowledge about the business of real estate. This will not just galvanize the real estate industry and help clean it up, but will also provide employment to countless individuals.

What’s in the works?

“If you look at Pakistan’s real estate industry right now, we are wasting money without any planning and investing in dead areas. There is a huge number of illegal commercial and housing societies in Pakistan that are a complete dead end for the county’s economy,” Shafiq tells Profit. “What is the reason behind the proliferation of such societies? It is simple, a complete lack of planning and basic data. According to the data that is available now, there are approximately 8,000 housing societies in the market that have property up for sale, whereas more than half of the societies (4000+) are unapproved for the last 50 years. Out of the existing 206 housing societies, almost half are still under the process of approval in Pakistan. How did we let things get to this point in the first place?”  

Currently, Pakistan is investing around $40-50 billion in real estate each year. Almost half of this capital is invested by overseas Pakistanis. But because there is a complete lack of planning, transparency, and in which 50% of capital is invested by overseas Pakistanis. Their capital is going into the debt trap because of the lack of planning. To this end, Graana.com is conducting studies in 26 cities of Pakistan, and has collected data regarding real estate, regulating authorities, values, and the physical surveys of the properties.

“There are so many things that people are not even aware of when they are investing. They do not know the difference between horizontal and vertical housing societies. How many people would know that less than 20% of commercial malls are successful across Pakistan? But real estate developers and agencies make grand promises on every project and people end up unwittingly investing billions of rupees into the building of these failed societies, shopping malls, and plazas that have no future and remain empty skeletons. This is what we want to change. Our clients should feel well informed while making any sort of decision,” explains Shafiq.

“Currently, Pakistan has the highest per capita demand for housing in the world – even more than China and India,” the Graana.com CEO claims. “If we build one million units (houses per year from 2021 onwards) we cannot achieve the target of a shortfall until as late as 2040 because our short-fall in demand and supply is higher than one million units per year. To achieve the target we just need to focus on planning to avoid malpractices in the real estate sector. This can easily be achieved by building the kind of infrastructure and using technology like we are doing at Graana.com.”

What does Graana.com offer? A sense of security.

We have already mentioned that of the $40-50 billion that gets poured into the real estate industry in Pakistan every year, half of it comes from overseas Pakistanis. We have also mentioned that the demand for houses in Pakistan is one of the highest in the world according to Shafiq Akbar. Real estate is already the second biggest industry in Pakistan in terms of employment. The only question is, with all this demand, how is real estate not a bigger business in Pakistan? The answer is that there is a complete lack of trust in the sector. That is what Shafiq Akbar is trying to change with Graana.com.

Apart from the lack of planning, which is damaging the business in the real estate sector, the absence of a sense of protection is another major issue which has not been addressed by the government and concerned authorities. The sense of protection is very important for private businesses in Pakistan. Property is legendary in Pakistan for court cases that last decades and plots that remain empty and unused because of stays over minor formalities at times. These cases happen in the first place because the deals being carried out are not by professionals. People do not trust real estate agents and they often do not understand the technicalities of the job. According to one estimate, around 30 to 40 percent of the revenue related to land and property is stuck in the courts. Professionals along with the establishment of real estate courts will go a long way in dealing with this problem.

“Currently there are approximately 100,000 Real estate agents working in Pakistan. But very few of these are trustworthy – and very few of them know what they are doing. That is why there is so much malpractice, lack of basic knowledge, and no expertise,” says Shafiq. “Of all these agents, our research has shown that only 437 estate agents are registered with excise and taxation authority.”

To address the issue, Shafiq Akbar suggests giving easy licenses on the one hand, and contracting on the other hand. The total net worth of real estate business of Pakistan, according to him, is Rs. 1 trillion, and if proper planning is being done then the Real Estate Value would increase by 12% to 14% or more.

“I would also suggest that the government plan 20 to 25 smart cities across the country to invite investment in the real estate sector as well as cater the demand of housing in the country. If we plan housing schemes and projects as per demand the real estate sector can earn more than the exports of the country. He suggests there should be a Well-planned Housing Scheme along every industrial Zone that would have much better appreciation value plus equivalent livings across the board.”