99.co sees over 5x traffic growth in 2 years

Property marketplace 99.co has seen its traffic grow 5 times in the course of two years.

The website’s monthly visits surpassed 2 million starting from February 2019. Visits almost hit 4 million in July, according to estimates by SimilarWeb.

99.co’s numbers have multiplied from two years ago when it was seeing about 450,000 visits a month.

That said, PropertyGuru and iProperty remain the largest property portals in Southeast Asia in terms of web visits.

99.co co-founder Darius Cheung (left) and PropertyGuru co-founder Jani Rautiainen. Image credit: VulcanPost

Counting only its Singapore traffic, 99.co’s monthly visits range between 475,000 and 965,000 between January and July this year.

Meanwhile, PropertyGuru’s traffic for its Singapore site has stayed constant, hovering above the 2 million mark, SimilarWeb data shows, with 1.6 million coming from the country.

PropertyGuru previously told Tech in Asia that SimilarWeb’s data does not factor in mobile app traffic or its commercial property site, CommercialGuru.

On the consumer end, PropertyGuru says, citing SimilarWeb, that it has 70% of the market in Singapore. It has 5.5 million monthly visits, according to internal Google Analytics data, which includes mobile app numbers.

Regardless, web visits is just one indicator of who’s ahead in the race. After all, traffic can be artificially pumped up by boosting marketing spending.

A PropertyGuru spokesperson tells Tech in Asia that 70% of its traffic is organic.

The most crucial performance indicator of either platform is revenue. In this context, it’s the number of property agents paying for either site’s subscriptions as well as the rate at which agents are dropping out.

PropertyGuru was recently criticized for increasing its subscription rates yet again. In response, the company revealed that it has a renewal rate of 80%. It also has 14,000 subscribing agents in Singapore, a spokesperson says.

Meanwhile, 99.co appears to have impressed investors enough to raise a US$15 million series B round.

While some property agents have said that they had no choice but to accept the price hike due to PropertyGuru’s supposed dominance, others don’t share the same sentiment.

99.co has thousands of premium subscribers, which means not all agents are reliant on PropertyGuru.

Both companies have been locked in a bitter rivalry for years. In 2016, PropertyGuru sued 99.co for a number of violations.

Both companies claimed victory after the court announced its verdict, although PropertyGuru was asked to pay 40% of 99.co’s legal fees.