As the real estate market is becoming more saturated in Bangkok, the avenues for sales, marketing and listings become an increasing necessity.

Hipflat’s recent integration with Facebook Marketplace is the perfect collaboration for the Thai market as the functions work well to help both clients and estate agents to improve their services. This will improve the real estate business overall as it moves into an accelerated digital era. 

Hipflat’s Denis Nemtsev explains in detail about the benefits of the new blockchain system and the overall benefits of integrating Facebook marketplace into the Bangkok real estate market.

The components of the Facebook marketplace in the real estate market are:

User search criteria

Facebook is location specific

Facebook’s goal is to be a one-stop shop

How will Facebook Marketplace benefit Hipflat in the long run?

Facebook is positioning Marketplace to become a one-stop commerce platform for food, shopping, and even job hunts. How does this impact your marketing efforts? Know that when users come to Marketplace, they are primed to be interested in all aspects of their housing prospects — from dining to neighbourhood attractions to community events.

Last month Facebook launched a revamped home rentals search on Facebook Marketplace in Thailand. Thailand has become the fifth country in the world, and the first in Asia where this feature is available. As a Facebook listing partner, Hipflat automatically publishes rental properties to Marketplace. This provides more exposure for our advertisers and generate additional leads. Over 30 million people in Thailand already using Facebook on a daily basis. As more of them start searching for properties on Marketplace it will become an important marketing channel for us. In fact, just two weeks after the launch, we already seeing a 15% increase in rental inquiries, thanks to additional exposure that Hipflat listings receive on Facebook Marketplace

Can you explain how Blockchain can improve and help Hipflat?

Online property search in Thailand can still be a very frustrating and time-consuming experience due to low quality of property listings across numerous web portals. Home-buyers and renters waste a lot of time investigating the wrong properties or properties that do not even exist. Hipflat is aiming to solve this problem with our own blockchain-enabled platform we call Domus Protocol (http://domus.network/). It allows crowd-sourcing property information from regular users and rewards members who contribute high-quality property data. It is sort of like Wikipedia for Real Estate: it is community-driven, independently sourced and verified by multiple members. Domus is a massive project, which will take years to achieve its ultimate goal of having 100% verified and trusted real estate data. Hipflat's Verified Listings feature, which we launched recently, is the very first step in its development What is it about that specific blockchain software that is different from the others?

We intend to develop Domus Protocol as a non-profit, open-source project, used and supported by different property portals. Blockchain enables this kind of collaboration by making it a platform, that can be trusted by both users and publishers. Its core features will be powered by smart contracts, which will enable transparency in data collection process, distribution of rewards and help to prevent malicious data entries What are your predictions for Blockchain in the industry and how will you find it to be effective?

Many exciting blockchain-powered projects are being developed for real estate industry by tech companies around the world. Various applications include digitising property titles, crowd-investing, smart contracts for improved real estate sales process, cross-border transactions and many others. I believe that we will see a lot of positive changes in the industry in the coming years. Thailand may become one of the innovation centres due to recently introduced law, that provides a way for blockchain companies to obtain funding from the public. This will attract both investors and tech companies to the country.