By: Ravi sinha
Track2Realty Exclusive: On a closer look there are big and serious questions on the authenticity and prima facie it appears as if the categories have been customised to fit in the highest bidder.
I can understand that any nomination being snubbed by the jury cries foul and this happens across the world, but the award winner have to have a crowd pleasing (read customer satisfaction) choice and not the whims and fancy of the organisers.
Has any of the award jury in real estate ever gone to cross check the customers’ experience of these realtors? Most of the award winning realtors have piles of cases pending, ranging from law enforcement agencies to consumer courts.
If the fixation of awards is just a B2B exercise and not related with voting results of the user experience, what is the relevance of such fraudulently operated awards?
I am afraid many of such “surviving on award distribution” companies don’t even reveal the selection criterion, rational and methodology behind awarding the lesser mortal realtors while biggies in the fray often prefer to stand out of the mess.
As one such leading award manufacturer once admitted, “it is a cut throat and cluttered segment now. The success of award in our case is that most of the award winning realtors themselves comes to take the award, unlike others where junior executives are sent for the photo session and trophy.”
Short on consumer confidence and high on award list seems to be the mantra of survival for some of the realtors for whom purchasing such, often expensive awards also translates into foreign funds who are not high on due diligence in this part of the world. Isn’t it a racket of fraudulently duping both the gullible home buyers and greedy investors?
No wonder, it is the fly-by-night realtors and mid-size greedy developers who are there to pay for the awards and make it a self-publicised glory. Biggies in the realty business have often been staying away from such awards since they know their acceptance to the trophy will only lend credence to the award racket while they as developers will be bracketed along with trophy greedy realtors in the market.
If CIA could rig a Nobel Prize in 1958, Indian realtors’ sense of sponsored glory is not going to hurt the global economy or polity, at least. It may hurt the greedy investors have already burnt their fingers in the Indian realty market, but where such awards are going to hurt the most is the gullible home buyers who often take the credibility of the developers on sheer face value that has stamp of award writ large.
