Before paying a booking amount, a careful buyer searches your company name. Often they add a word: "reviews", "complaints", "delay", "RERA", "past projects". Some ask ChatGPT whether you are reliable.
As far as that buyer is concerned, what they find is your reputation. And for many small and mid-size builders, what they find is a mess nobody chose: an old website still announcing a launch from years ago, a social media page last updated at Diwali, a directory listing with a wrong phone number, a forum thread where one unhappy buyer from a past project has had the last word for years.
You cannot control everything on that page of results. You can make sure your own side of the story is there, clear and current.
Search yourself the way a buyer would
Start by looking. Use a private (incognito) window on your phone, so Google does not personalise the results for you, and search each of these:
- Your company name
- Your company name and your city
- Your company name and "reviews"
- Your company name and "complaints"
- Each project name
- Each project name and "RERA"
Screenshot the first screen of each. That first screen is what a buyer sees before deciding whether to take you seriously.
Your company page is your record
The single most useful thing you can publish is a plain, factual page about your company. Not a mission statement. A record.
It should say when the firm started and who runs it, with real names and photographs of the people behind it. Buyers are handing over lakhs to a company, and they want to know there are people accountable for it.
Then list your projects, every one, including the small early ones. For completed projects: the locality, the number of units, the year of handover and whether the OC, the occupancy certificate, was received. For ongoing projects: the RERA number, current stage and registered completion date. Add upcoming projects only once they are registered.
A list like that is hard to argue with. A family comparing you with a bigger brand in Gachibowli may well choose the smaller builder who can show several completed buildings, with photos of people living in them, over a glossy name with little history in the city.
Keep completed projects on the site permanently. They are your proof. The same thinking applies to listings, covered in don't delete sold listings.
Claim your Google Business Profile
When someone searches your company name, Google often shows a panel with your office on a map, your phone number, hours, photos and reviews. That comes from a Google Business Profile, and it is free to claim.
Make sure the name, address and phone number match your website exactly. Add real photos of your office and your completed buildings. Then ask owners in your completed projects to leave an honest review. Do not buy reviews or write them yourself: buyers can usually tell, and Google's policies prohibit fake reviews. There is a step-by-step guide in setting up a Google Business Profile for a real estate office.
Handle criticism in the open
If a search for your name turns up a complaint, do not panic, and do not try to bury it under fake praise. A builder with a long track record and one old complaint looks normal. A builder with nothing but five-star reviews looks suspicious.
Where you can reply, reply once, calmly, with facts: what went wrong, what you did about it, and how the person can reach you. Then fix whatever caused it. Future buyers often read the reply more carefully than the complaint.
The AI version of this search
Some buyers now skip the results page and ask an AI assistant instead: "Is this builder in Hyderabad reliable?" or "Which projects has this company completed?" The assistant builds its answer from what is published and readable on the web.
Nobody can guarantee what ChatGPT or any other assistant will say about you. What you can do is make it easier to get right: one clear company page, completed projects listed as text, RERA numbers written out, and the same name, address and phone number everywhere. How assistants go looking is explained in how ChatGPT and other AI assistants find a property agent.
The encouraging part is that your own name is the easiest search there is to show up for, because few pages on the internet are really about you. A proper company page can start appearing for it within weeks. That is the thinking behind ranking for your own business name before anything else.
This week
Do the six searches above and save the screenshots. Then write your company page: founding year, the people, and a complete list of projects with localities, years and OC status. Claim or correct your Google Business Profile. In three months, run the same searches again and compare the screenshots side by side.
