Taking a real estate agency in Pakistan digital: where to start

Real estate in Pakistan has gone digital around the agency. Buyers search on property portals and social media, tokens and instalments are paid by bank transfer, and land records and stamp papers are moving online. Inside most agencies, though, the deal still lives in a diary, a spreadsheet and a WhatsApp chat. That gap is where an agency loses leads, payments and commission, and it is the part an agency can fix itself.

What going digital means for an agency

It does not mean a new website or more Facebook ads. It means that every property, client, offer, payment and commission is recorded once, in one place that the owner, managers and agents all see. Marketing brings buyers in; the record is what turns them into closed deals.

Move these off paper first

1. Leads and their requirements. A buyer's budget, area and plot size, recorded when they call, so any agent can follow up.
2. Offers, tokens and bayana. The amounts, dates and CNIC details, kept on the deal with a receipt, not in a photo on someone's phone.
3. Payment plans. Every instalment with its due date, so late payments are seen the day they are late.
4. Commission. The split agreed on the deal before it closes, so there is nothing to argue about when the money arrives.
5. Properties. Each plot or house once, with its size in the unit from its documents and the marla standard stated.

Keep WhatsApp, change what it's for

WhatsApp is how Pakistani buyers and agents talk, and no agency should try to stop that. The change is that WhatsApp becomes the way listings and updates are sent, while the record of what was offered and paid lives in the agency's system.

Choosing real estate software

Software built for other countries assumes square feet, mortgages and dollars. A Pakistani agency needs marla, kanal and square yards on the right marla standard, tokens and bayana, instalment plans, commission splits between agents, prices in lakh and crore, and a phone app agents will actually use on site visits.

• Ask to see your own kind of deal in the demo: a society plot on instalments, a rental, a resale with a token.
• Check that one agency's data is kept apart from another's, and that you can export yours at any time.
• Ask who imports your existing spreadsheets, and how long it takes.
• Compare the price per user in rupees, including annual billing.

A realistic timeline

A small or mid-sized agency can move in about four weeks without stopping work: take stock, import what is active, run new deals in the new system, then move the rest across. The four-week plan in our guide to moving off WhatsApp and spreadsheets walks through each week.

aaraazi is real estate software built in Karachi for exactly this move, with a mobile app for solo agents, a shared workspace for agencies and a plan for developers selling on instalments.