Magicbricks Launches Travel Time Search Feature

Online property portal Magicbricks has launched a new feature on its website that lets users search an area on the basis of travel time.

Users can search for properties on basis the travel time from their place of interest, by searching on key landmarks such as schools, hospitals, markets, offices. Travel time can be defined on the basis of walking, driving time, or public transport.

Magicbricks has launched different ways for searching properties on its site this year, new map based search, and smart search, which lets uses know what is available on a budget, said Sudhir Pai, CEO, Magicbricks.com, speaking to Gadgets 360.

"It pulls data out of Google's Public APIs - if you use Google Maps, I'm sure you would have noticed the red and blue lines which are traffic data. We have pulled that data out, and mapped it to the landmark and point of interest data which was in our tables, and we correlate that," Pai said, adding that the travel time was calculated on the basis of real driving data, averaged out to arrive at an estimate.

Magicbricks will be launching a property auction platform next week, Pai said, a first amongst property portals, and launching a new mobile app with a contemporary design.

The primary use cases for Magicbricks were renting, resale buying, and new home buying, Pai said. "All three are reasonably well used. Broadly, for us it's almost a 50:50 ratio between rent and buy, and 40:60 between resale and new properties," He said.

Launched in 2006, Magicbricks claimed to have over a million listings at the end of September 2015, with 24,000 listings being posted daily. The portal offers apps for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone.