Mumbai: Real estate developer Tata Housing on Wednesday said it has partnered with social networking firm Facebook to sell its affordable homes online.

The initiative is in line with the company’s target to generate over 30% of its overall sales online in the next five years. Currently, the company has sold around 2,000 homes online in the last three years, accounting for nearly 10% of its total sales.

Through this new campaign titled ‘Social sell’ on Facebook, the company plans to sell around 250 units of its new five-acre residential project in Goa called Codename —Goa Paradise. The company said such an initiative of directly selling homes through a social networking site is first of its kind in India.

“Selling homes through our online platform has helped strengthen our position even during the downturn as the online medium has the potential to reach to much wider range of customers across the world,” said Brotin Banerjee, managing director and chief executive officer, Tata Housing at a press conference here.

He said the increasing penetration of Internet in India will be the next game changer for the real industry. The company has earlier tied up with real estate portal Housing.com and online marketplace Snapdeal to sell its housing units across the country.

“Our target is to have one third of our total sales coming from online in the next five to six years. Depending on the success of this initiative on Facebook we will look at extending it for our other residential projects,” Banerjee said.

Facebook India, managing director, Kirthiga Reddy said there are over 132 million monthly active users of Facebook in India and such initiative will push other brands to drive awareness, generate leads and deliver sales on the social networking site.

Tata Housing started selling homes online in India in 2013 through its partnership with Google as part of The Great Shopping Festival. At present, the company has listed all its projects online. It currently has 29 projects with around 70 million square feet under various stages of development at 13 locations across the country.

Bidya Sapam