1. Insomniacs’ Highs and Lows
This year, we saw a peak between January and March. Firstly, stamp duty reduction in Mumbai and Pune helped us clock more than 1,000 crores plus sales via digital in these three months. This was followed by a dull period between April and June, where pandemic again aided in the slowdown. But not to forget, compared to last year, the sales observed for our clients remained better than last year. Talking about 2021, we added another 4,500 crores of sales for our clients via digital. We are now expecting to end the year between 4,800-5,000 crores. Overall, it was a year full of highs and lows. But as we worked around everything that takes us down in a unique manner, we changed our lows to our learning points and excelled in various ways.
2. Focus on CAC
Remaining true to our promise of helping realtors reduce their customer acquisition cost with the help of digital, tech and data analytics, we helped our clients acquire customers at the lowest cost per acquisition. 50% of these bookings were acquired below 1% marketing spends, 26% between 1%-1.5%, 14% of them between 1.5% -2% and the rest between 2%-2.5%. With the help of marketing attribution, location data intelligence and our tech, we aim to bring 100% of our acquisitions below 1.25% in the next 2 years. And that would be a real win for us.
3. Insomniacs Marks Its Journey in Three New Cities
We are still so excited to share that last year, Insomniacs consolidated its position as the number one real estate marketing, technology and data analytics network by starting physical operations in Delhi, Pune and Bengaluru. Having served in these cities in 2019 and 2020, we were confident to start our physical operations and client servicing in these three major hubs. The network we have bagged in all these cities consist of all Grade-A developers and leaders of their markets. Like Delhi, we managed to work with Emaar, DLF, Berkshire Hathaway Orenda India and India Sotheby's International Realty. In Bengaluru, we got the opportunity to work with Prestige, Vaswani, Flow Realty and UKN, while in Pune, we started our ride with ABIL, Kolte Patil, Mantra, NaikNavare, Pride Purple and Sukhwani.
4. Brought Technology At The Center Stage
In the last two years, we have invested heavily in our technology to offer innovations and solutions that could help realtors reduce their CAC with the help of technology. By now, the network has invested $1 million dollars to strengthen the tech arm, and there are many modules we are rolling out this year which has got us excited. The entire 2020-21 witnessed our product success in the form of Virtual Runways that helped developers showcase their projects to their customers virtually. This year, we found inroads with our flagship offering called Marketing Signal that helps developers make better media mix with the help of marketing mix modelingṣ and AI. Our IDX platform called Web Auto for brokers and Performance Meter for developers are the two new modules to be introduced under our tech suite - Totality. We have got some tremendous responses for both in our pilots, and we are excited to make these two bigger and more streamlined.
5. The Ever-growing Team and Leadership
The second wave did derail our plan of team expansion for a few months. But the good news is that we grew from a 90-people team in 2020 to 145 people with leadership appointed for all new city operations until now. The majority of these hirings have happened in business development and tech roles. In this expansion, a 30-member team expansion was fuelled by inorganic means by acqui-hiring two tech teams, one from Bhavnagar and one from Surat. In the coming year, we are looking to expand our footprint in international markets as well as tier 2 cities. Tier 2 city expansion plans are mostly inorganic. Dubai is the first international territory we are aiming to start our operation from, in the first quarter of next financial year. We are determined to expand the team to 200 members by March 2022 to keep a check on the growing demand for our offerings.
As we are ready to step into the new calendar year, we have fastened our seatbelts and pulled up the socks to embark on a new journey of becoming better, bigger and brisker. Stay tuned to our blogs and social media handles to track our journey. Insomniacs is here to be the unstoppable real estate expert in India and beyond.
