Design and visualize your dream home with Ghar360

Building a dream house is a priority for almost all of us, yet there is no tangible route to view how that dream compares with reality. We try a lot of designs and plan our dream house accordingly, but at the time of final delivery don’t really get want we expected.

Now with Ghar360, one can visualize how their home would look like even before embarking on the physical construction. Co-founded by Ajesh Joy and Sanju Thomas in August 2013 in Bangalore, Ghar360 is a product from TechZag Solutions Pvt Ltd.

Ghar360 is a cloud based 3D augmented reality platform that enables users to design and visualize their potential future home.It focusses on providing IT solutions for the architecture and interior design industry. It digitizes the floor plan into an interactive walkable space and is changing the way consumers do their interior shopping by integrating real products into the platform. This gives every house owner indispensably advantageous access to their floor plan. The platform also targets users who are looking for home renovation solutions and home products online. Ghar360 has ties with vendors across 80+ categories that sell home products both offline as well as online.

“At Ghar360we are reinventing the interior shopping experience by digitizing the floor plan into an interactive walkable space. Along with an aerial view of the floor plan, this product gives a realistic feeling to the person even before it is really constructed. It is as simple as playing a Counter Strike or an IGI game,” explains Ajesh.

Recently, the company added a new feature called Ghar360 Ideas to its flagship product Ghar360. On Ghar360 Ideas, users can bookmark their favourite images or videos online from various sources and can save those either as public or private. They can refer to these later while designing their home, or for multiple uses in the future.

According to Ajesh, construction and architecture industry is a $78 billion market growing at a rate of 14% per annum. Interior design industry is a $32 billion market and home renovation is an $11 billion market. Eyeing huge potential in these markets,the idea of Ghar360 was generated.

The idea gathered momentum when co-founders came across people facing difficulty in building homes or related issues. For instance, Ajesh’s relative, a Dubai resident, wanted to build a home in India but was unable to have a clear idea on how the house would look after its completion. He couldn’t articulate the exact design of his house. The duo thus wanted to solve these problems and provided their users a platform on which they could design their dream home, share their ideas and get exactly what they dreamt of.

Ghar360 team comprises of a group of people with myriad expertise. Holding an MBA degree in HR and marketing, Ajesh has three years of experience in marketing. He is a BE in electronics and communication engineering.

Sanju Thomas holds a computer science engineering degree and has an experience of five years in cloud and enterprise applications. Both Ajesh and Sanju know each other since 2005 as they graduated from the same institute- Karunya University Coimbatore.

Richa S.P. Gupta is an interior designer and is passionate about interior designing, architecture and construction. Sandeep MT, senior web developer at Ghar360 is an engineer from SCMS, Ernakulam.

Revenue model of Ghar360

In order to reach home owners through digitized floor plans, Ghar360 has certain distribution channels and networks. The distribution channels comprises of builders, architects, interior designers, real estate portals, agents and brokers, retail brands, online e-commerce websites and offline stores.

• Builders have access to the floor plans and are either charged on the basis of floor plans they create or are charged a premium fee based on the type of flat- 1BHK, 2BHK, 3BHK, etc.
• Interior designers and architects- In this case Ghar360 connects users to interior designers once a property is purchased.The users and interior designers share ideas using 3D floor plan created by Ghar360. This ultimately generates revenues as the leads are passed on to interior designers.
• Real Estate portals like 99Acres, Magicbricks, etc., that are using Ghar360 are other revenue generators.
• Ghar360 charges the online retailers a onetime setup cost per product and also earns a per cent on every sale which is an affiliate based commission.
• A white labelled software as a service is offered to retail brands which lists their products on their website and users can try their product using Ghar360’s technology.
• The product generates its revenues from end users where they pay for creating every new floor plan keeping the first floor plan free.

Funded by Times Internet Ltd, Ghar360 managed a significant reach in the ecosystem. They also market themselves through social media, online campaigns, contests, exhibitions, events, etc.

The space is heating up with startups coming up. One such company is Nestopia which states as a TripAdvisor+LinkedIn for interior designing. That’s not all. Recently Livspace, a home interior design and decor marketplace, raised funds worth $4.6 million. Entrepreneur and veteran investor SrikanthIyer ventured into interior design with HomeLane and Dwll is also eyeing at organizing the interior design industry.

But the Ghar360 management is very optimistic as the core differentiation of the product includes: embedment onto any websites, can be shared via any social media, email etc., has API Integration and provides real products,home customization and digitalized floor plans.

Like any other flagship product, Ghar360 also faces few challenges. The major ones include load time, online 3D rendering, real products and API integration. Though the management tried many ways of overcoming these, Ajesh believes in the famous quote- ‘There are no shortcuts to real success.’

“We started working very closely on those areas researching, seeking help, etc. and the end results are a huge success,” adds Ajesh.

Eyeing great potential in the Indian market, the management aims to digitize floor plans of one million homes in India within next two years. They also aspire to renovate homes of over ten million users worldwide in the next five years.

Given that the Indian construction industry is an $11 billion market growing at a rate of 6% every year, will Ghar360 create a revolutionary change in the future?