Delhi-NCR's real estate market has transformed beyond recognition over the last decade.The channel partner ecosystem is no longer a business you can run on a contacts list. It requires systems, compliance infrastructure, and institutional credibility that takes years to build. For women, those years have come with an additional set of challenges the market has never quite acknowledged.
Sonali Mahant, Founder of Better Gains Realtors and Joint Treasurer at APP, Delhi NCR; is one practitioner who has navigated all of it. She has been associated with several marquee NCR launches, including Godrej Properties' Astra and Majesty. We sat down with her to understand what this market looks like from where she stands.
Q: The realtor's role is often misunderstood. What does running a practice in this market actually involve?
A: People see the commission and think they understand the business. But there are several nuances to it. Lead acquisition alone is a significant investment, advertising, portal listings, events, a team managing sourcing, site visits, and post-sales. Industry estimates suggest 60 to 70 per cent of leads never convert. Without tracking conversion ratios at every stage, you're flying blind. I run Better Gains the way you'd run any serious professional services firm, with systems, data, weekly reviews. That's the only way to build something that lasts through multiple cycles, not just one boom.
Q: RERA is nearly a decade old. Has it actually changed things, or is it mostly paperwork?
A: It changed things fundamentally. What RERA did was separate the professionals from the opportunists. When documentation becomes non-negotiable, the casual operator exits, and that's a good thing for everyone who stayed. On the developer side, working with institutional players like say a Godrej Properties means inventory access is process-driven, payouts are milestone-linked. There's no ambiguity. That structure is frankly easier to work within than the informal arrangements that preceded it.
Q: What was it like, early on, as a woman building a practice in NCR real estate?
A: It felt like uncharted terrain, and not in a romantic way. The market was deeply opaque. Layout plans changed without notice, delivery timelines were promises in the air, brokerage structures were undisclosed, payouts manipulated. As a realtor you were caught in the middle, your client was trusting you, and the system around you was actively working against both of you. A significant part of my early career wasn't about selling homes. It was about protecting people from a market that had no incentive to protect them. That's the market I learned in. It made me meticulous and sharp. But I think that's what this profession demands of anyone who takes it seriously.
Q: Has professionalisation made it easier for women to operate in this space?
A: Easier is the wrong word. More equitable, perhaps, and only in specific ways. When performance is tracked through systems, the subjective assessment of whether you belong in a room loses power. However, the informal economy hasn't disappeared, it has shifted. Certain developer tiers, certain launch allocations, the social capital of decades in the right circles, these still don't accrue equally. A woman building from scratch doesn't inherit a client base or developer relationships. She builds both from zero, often evaluated differently at every step. The structure helps. It doesn't fix it.
Q: Give us a moment that captures what good consulting actually looks like in practice.
A: A few years ago I had a client, a couple, with a good budget with their heart set buying a villa project in Greater Noida. The presentation was compelling,but I knew the developer's track record. I knew that project was unlikely to be delivered on time, if at all. It took a couple of weeks to shift their perspective, not by telling them they were wrong, but by walking them through the background, the red flags that don't show up in a sales deck. Eventually I took them to a Godrej Properties project in the same geography. They were hesitant. But they trusted the process. Today they live in a golf-facing villa at one of Greater Noida's most prestigious addresses. Its value has tripled. The original project? Still undelivered. That, for me, is what this work is about.
Q: What would you tell a woman in her late twenties seriously considering this career?
A: The market will test you in ways that have nothing to do with your knowledge of it. You'll walk into rooms where you're not expected. You'll give advice that gets credited to someone else. You'll close deals nobody will publicly acknowledge you closed. But if you stay, and if you build something real, that track record becomes the thing that walks into the room before you do. Nobody can take that away. Build the practice first. The recognition follows. Just don't wait for permission.
Most people in this industry are waiting for the market to be kind to them. Mahant decided, a long time ago, that she'd rather be good.
.png)