Until recently Twitter, WhatsApp and Facebook were social media tools that were designed primarily for the young to connect, post selfies and do fun things. But that’s passé. Now hashtags and twitter handles have turned into valuable tools to make your voice heard and bring about change. Homebuyers in India are the latest to have adopted social media in their desperate fight with developers to get the homes they have spent their life’s savings on.

USING SOCIAL MEDIA TO SAVE THEIR HOMES

Thousands of homebuyers, particularly in the National Capital Region (NCR) – home to property hot spots like Gurgaon, Noida, Greater Noida are stuck with developers who have taken them for a ride. In many cases, projects have been delayed by over 4 years with no clear completion date in sight. And now, these homebuyers have taken to social media with a vengeance. Tweets, WhatsApp messages and Facebook updates are posted every minute, lashing out at the developers and local authorities who have let this situation develop.

“It has been over four years now and I still do not know if I will ever get my home. I have paid 100% of the cost. All that I am getting from the builder is new completion deadlines every time I meet them. And these deadlines are never honoured, they just keep shifting. So we homebuyers got together and started this campaign against the builder to shame him. What else do we do?” asks an anguished Shiv Shankar, who had booked his home with Amrapali in 2009 and was promised a delivery date of 2012.

And it is not just developers who are facing the heat. Homebuyers have launched twitter campaigns like #ReraHaryanaFirst and setup the ‘Fight for Rera’ page on Facebook to force the Central and state governments to implement the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016 and set up housing regulators across the different states within a year.

#Amrapali #centurianpark #amrapalicenturianpark .. Booked my dream home in tropical garnen, 47% payment paid, till date no hope for home…

— Parmendra Kumar (@parmendra) April 26, 2016

#Amrapali #centurianpark @priyankasambhav @Pehredar pls help Lac of buyers from Amrapali Fraudulent.
Loosing hope of my dream home.

— Raghavendra Singh (@pratapraghav) April 21, 2016

TWITTER EMERGES THE HOMEBUYERS’ FAVOURITE

While homebuyers were always connecting with each other through WhatsApp and Facebook, it is Twitter that seems to have given them a platform to make their voice heard. In fact, homebuyers of the Amrapali Group took to twitter recently, forcing the company’s brand ambassador – MS Dhoni, to resign. The negative fallout forced the developer to set up a help desk and Akhilesh Yadav, the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh (the state where the Amrapali project is located) intervened to help home buyers. Similar campaigns are being run by home buyers against other developers like BPTP, Supertech, Unitech, Gardenia, Cosmos and Jaypee.

Want to throw your money into a bin? Invest in #supertech its equivalent #Supertechsuperfraud

— amitabh srivastava (@amitabh25) April 30, 2016

#gardenia46noidajustice So many buyers suffrng in Noida,,still no talks of RERA act by UP. Hope Nat.Commission to give justic to families..

— Anup Rustagi (@annu44) 2 May 2016

Govt should stop companies like #tvs and #unitech taking the dreams and money of the people over undelivered real estate. @narendramodi

— Vanitha Muthukumar (@bluediamond108) 1 May 2016

“We have been tracking and analysing tweets and trends. To our surprise we have seen a significant jump in homebuyers taking to twitter and in fact unless there has been some tweet from a superstar or a celebrity, over the past few days the maximum number of tweets has been from homebuyers and the trends is rising. In fact the number of users have done up to almost 160 million.” claims Rajiv Dingra, CEO of WATmedia, a firm that analyses social media trends

In the past, developers may simply have been able to ignore homebuyers, but in the day and age of social media that is clearly not an option. Social media has given homebuyers a platform to stand up to erring developers, naming and shaming them for the entire world to see.

Reporter: Oineetom Ojha, NDTV
Web Editor: Nikhil Narayan Sivadas, NDTV