Written By: Anil Kapilashrami, Co-founder and CEO, roofontop.com
Earlier this year when we were looking for our office space, my partner in crime, Sharad and I must have seen approximately 100 or so spaces. We used the various portals, property agents and even our friends and family sources.
Earlier this year when we were looking for our office space, my partner in crime, Sharad and I must have seen approximately 100 or so spaces. We used the various portals, property agents and even our friends and family sources.
We saw everything from extravagant offices
in Golf Course Road to space in large swanky commercial buildings with
dedicated garage parking to offices in Sohna Road. From the state-of-the-art commercial
buildings to approved residential style office space, we saw almost everything
that new Gurgaon has to offer, I believe.
We tried to specify our requirement as
clearly as possible when we searched the portals; we did the same when we spoke
to the Real Estate Agents, however, we saw a variety of things that didn’t come
at all close to what we were looking for.
Our requirement was, in my view, simple –furnished
office space for approximately twenty-five people with open seating, one large
meeting room to seat 8-10 people and a second meeting room for 5 or so
people. In addition to this, we needed a
small area for a server room and a pantry.
The rest of the space was open seating with standard modular, cubicle
style furniture. Nothing extravagant was
required but a decent, open functional office. We had no specific colour requirements other than - NO gaudy!
I could clearly picture not only my dream
office but even several visions of acceptable offices.
But boy did we see everything but the
images I had envisioned. We saw builder
and broker offices for rent that had huge leather sofas and huge chairs with
colour schemes from red to pink to green.
We saw large football field size spaces with no furniture and we saw
sweatshop style areas with no ACs, but barely revolving fans and 2 foot work
areas for staff. We saw an architect’s
office with high table and stool seating for blueprints, etc. We even saw a 300 square foot area where the
agent swore to us that 25 people could fit.
I absolutely knew that we were not
connecting with the agents or the portals when we saw an office space on the 5th
floor devoid of an elevator. After
huffing and puffing up the staircase, we saw the most dust covered desktops and
servers,with mouse traps under each cubicle.
Anyway, long story short, we finally found
roofontop.com’s haven. However, it was
certainly an experience.
----
Wanting to spare our Customers looking for
property the type of experience we went through, we came up with an idea – the Facebook Social Property Finder. This FB app is quite simple in its concept. It allows a user to select from properties
that match the “visual image” that the user has of his/her property and find
their dream property.
The user selects from images representing
exterior and interior of properties and only those properties that match these
images are displayed. Beyond this, the
user can further select based on other criteria.
We have adopted the app to both commercial
office space and residential spaces.
A simple concept derived from some personal
pain we have experienced. Hopefully it
will save some of you the pain when looking for property!
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