Depending on how you feel about the way real estate works now, the idea of sticking a house in your Internet shopping cart and clicking “Buy” may or may not appeal to you. Advances in technology mean that you can buy a new house without even going outside, and get a discount for doing so…in India.

Homebuilders’ websites work like a showroom or a demo unit, with three-dimensional walkthroughs available on the screen. The discounts for doing this can be huge: one builder offers 12% off an apartment that costs about $102,000, for example.

E-commerce company Alibaba also worked with a developer to sell houses on the company’s Taobao marketplace, which is pretty much the equivalent of buying a condo on Amazon. Shoppers in India use sites like Housing.com and even the e-commerce site SnapDeal, where you can also buy clothes, toys, and other regular old merchandise.

One realtor in India told Bloomberg News that it will be impossible for online real estate sales to replace its real-life counterpart, but online sales have been a great way for the housing market in India to deal with some excess housing in new developments that had been delayed.

Indians Are Spending Millions Buying Homes Online [Bloomberg]

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