Why we charge you, not builders
A ₹1–3 Cr home is the largest financial decision most Indian buyers ever make. You deserve advice that isn't paid for by the other side.
How most real-estate portals make money
Listings portals (99acres, MagicBricks, Housing.com) sell leads to builders. Brokerages (PropTiger, Square Yards) earn 2–4% commission on every closed deal. Newer "tech-enabled buyer brokerages" do the same — they take a builder commission and rebate part of it back to you as "cashback" or a "loyalty reward".
Disclosure of that commission is good practice. But disclosure does not change the underlying incentive: a platform paid when deals close earns more when more deals close. That structural pull is independent of what the platform says.
What changes when readers pay
We charge you for paid services on /consult:
- ₹0 — LRG Snapshot + Title Report PDF (email-gated LRG snapshot + free watermarked title report for any project)
- ₹1,999 — Prelaunch (pre-launch / pre-RERA assessment + 30-min expert call)
- ₹4,999 — Verified Documents (full document bundle + analyst report + 30-min expert call)
We are paid the same whether the data we publish says Buy Now or Avoid. We are paid the same whether you close the deal or walk away. We have no commercial reason to soften a score, hide a hard cap, or push a particular project. That is the structural difference. Our conflict-of-interest declaration lays out every revenue channel in detail.
The reader-paid trade-off — honestly
This model has one cost to you: there is no "cashback". A broker-rebate platform on a ₹2 Cr purchase might return ₹2–3 lakh to you. We won't. The ₹1,999–₹4,999 you pay us is a real cost. What you get instead is data that wasn't bought by either side of the transaction you're evaluating.
For some buyers, the cashback is worth more than the independence. For others — especially buyers who've been burned by builder marketing or know exactly how the lead-gen economy works — the independence is worth more than the cashback. Both are reasonable. We exist for the second.
How to verify we mean it
- Read our conflict-of-interest declaration
- Check our editorial policy — recusal rule, source discipline, correction process
- Browse our corrections log — every fix we've made, public
- Look at any project page where a hard cap triggers (e.g. NCLT exposure or RERA invalid). If we softened that for the builder, you'd be the first to spot it.