When building your dream home, it’s only natural to feel attached to the outcome. It only makes sense to desire perfection when you’re investing a lot of money. The right house starts with the right construction team.Outlook India caught up with Abhijith Ramapriyan, CEO, buildAhome.
1. Tell us about your company? How did you come up with the idea and when did you start?
Personal or individual home construction is a rather unorganized market sector, where traditional contractual workforce struggle with outdated designs, processes and endless everyday struggles of labor shortages, payment delays, issues with raw material supplies. Even structural designs are left to contractors on thumb rule calculations leading to unnecessary project delays. Infact, a large part of the market still operates the same way by hiring individual contractors and facing multitudes of issues during construction.
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I spoke to friends, families and contract workers who struggled with such issues in the home construction journey and decided to launch buildAhome in April 2016. The idea was to bring this entire ecosystem together and create a more regulatory and systemized form of home construction. And, provide a more holistic and delightful experience for customers planning to begin the construction work on their dream homes and realizing that building a house is an emotional journey for every individual that should be memorable and not cumbersome. Today, 600+ homes later, this vision is turning into a reality.
2. What is your vision and mission for your company?
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We are currently in a relentless pursuit of providing a seamless experience to people who want to build their dream homes. Affordability and Transparency is key in our business and we take utmost care to ensure we have all tools in place to help our clients in this process. Our larger vision and mission is to educate more people on sustainable and wellness-minded living.
3. What were the difficulties and challenges you encountered while establishing buildAhome, and how did you get beyond them?
Like any other business, our line of work has its fair share of challenges too. The biggest one being trust. Our initial few clients were skeptical when they started work with us but soon they became the biggest source of referral for newer clients to join us. Since this is a largely unorganized market, getting all the right workforces under one roof , dealing with the right cost of raw materials to provide the lowest prices in the market, without lowering our standards on quality was also a challenge. Now, we have vendors who trust us and hence provide us with the best and lowest market rates.
4. Why do you think that there is a need for your company to exist in today’s market? What would you like to change about your industry?What differentiates you from your competitors?
However, there is a huge gap in the demand and supply of the market which needs to be capitalized on. While people dream of building homes, the actual process is not as easy and comes with numerous challenges as mentioned previously. In such cases, buildAhome provides the opportunity to bridge the gap and take lead in the opportunity presented.
We are a full service turnkey construction and real estate development company. We have been in business for over 6 years, and have completed thousands of projects. Our team consists of highly skilled professionals, experts with experience in real estate development and construction. We strive to provide high quality workmanship that satisfies our clients needs at the most affordable prices in the industry:—we know what works and what doesn't, and we know how to execute on both.We have a unique approach to real estate development that has helped us to stand out from the crowd, We focus on providing our clients with a truly unique experience. We don't just build houses; we build homes that are comfortable, beautiful, and functional.
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5. What is the product roadmap in the years to come? What are your expansion plans?
In terms of product development we have the best ERP systems in the industry where contractors and vendors can include their bids and get transparency in supply and demand of their products. And we will continue in our efforts to innovate in this space.
For our customers, we are developing technology where they can design their dream homes and buildAhome can modify their design needs with little to no architectural modifications, instead of completely relying on architectural designs. The idea is to make home building a more involved process for the consumers but at ease with the help of technology. Additionally, our expansion plans include smart developments up north, looking at the ongoing climate crisis, with major heat and cold waves causing innumerable diseases; Intervention, rethinking and reestablishment in the turnkey home construction segments is the need of the hour in northern India. Our focus will be towards sustainability and creating more holistic, well-being homes for our customers, being cognizant that homes need to be an amalgamation of the mind, body and space, and not just ‘green homes’ that include sustainable materials.
