There is a practised flamboyance about Ravi Kewalramani, a real estate broker, as he sweeps through rooms at a South Mumbai 2BHK, rattling off architectural features "10.5 feet height", "vintage granite tiles", "old-world balcony" - while an iPhone cameraman keeps pace.
No reality show deal yet, but his home tour videos have brought the 43-year-old stardom online. In the past four years, he has found 1.1 million Instagram followers, 920,000 YouTube subscribers, and dozens of HNI patrons. Kewalramani doesn't spend long on the apartment where we meet: It's a rental, going for ₹2.75 lakh per month. He is saving energy to show off outright sale properties, priced at ₹5 crore and up.
Robust demand for high-end homes among some in India, and equally robust curiosity among others about what these homes look like, has been allowing small brokers to hit impressive numbers as content creators. In 2023, Mumbai entered the world's top 10 luxury residential markets, according to Knight Frank India, and city homes costing more than ₹10 crore had their biggest half year of sales in 2024, per India Sotheby's International Realty. Besides, the fact that reliable information can be hard to come by in the still-murky sector means people are paying attention to real estate agents who are prominent.
Kewalramani started filming homes "for survival" when the pandemic threatened to put the brokerage out of business, editing the early slapdash videos on his own. Now his views across platforms exceed 300 million, though only about 10 per cent of the sales leads generated online convert to serious offline discussions.
This story is from the September 02, 2024 edition of Business Standard.
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This story is from the September 02, 2024 edition of Business Standard.
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