How a startup aims to beat PropertyGuru in Thailand

The ZmyHome team / Photo credit: ZmyHome

Thailand has many real estate portals, but it takes almost a year on average to sell a house in the country, says entrepreneur Natthapon Asswisessiwakul.

He blames this on at least two things. First, many of the houses on property listing sites carry sky-high price tags, no thanks to exorbitant broker commission and fees that are tucked into them. Second, the sites are filled with incomplete, fake, and outdated listings from brokers due to lack of verification. If you’re a buyer, this means you might be paying for a lot more than you should, while a bogus listing is a total waste of your time.

Asswisessiwakul knew these pain points, having worked at property research and consulting firm CBRE for seven years and founded his own brokerage firm after that. Seeing the opportunity, he launched ZmyHome in late 2015 as a way for people to sell, rent out, and buy houses without the help of a real estate agent.

With US$400,000 in fresh capital from KK Fund, ZmyHome aims to give home sellers and buyers the confidence to transact on their own by providing them accurate massive data. That’s how it intends to stand out from other property listing sites like PropertyGuru’s DDproperty. “We want a clean and well-organized platform similar to the hotel industry,” says Asswisessiwakul.

Bringing transparency to the market

Only property developers or home owners are allowed to post on ZmyHome to ensure that the information is true and up-to-date. They must provide a title, deed, or any government document that indicates the house’s identification number and names them as owner before a listing is approved. This minimizes the possibility of a fake listing, says the founder.

It also supposedly guarantees buyers the best prices by excluding the middlemen. Broker listings usually include commission and other fees charged to either the users or the sellers. And given that most sellers will figure the fees into their price, buyers pay indirectly too.

One thing that’s keeping individuals from selling direct is that they don’t know how to price their properties. ZmyHome offers data on sold homes in a specific location, allowing sellers to study it and compare. Buyers looking for properties get access to the data as well. Asswisessiwakul says they get owners to update the status of their properties as either “available” or “sold” on a monthly basis via Facebook and phone calls.

Once a seller and a buyer agree on a deal, they can use a free standard purchasing agreement on ZmyHome. Or they can opt for the startup’s legal processing service, which still costs “very low compared to the broker commission.”

Listing on ZmyHome is free, and the startup charges sellers per impression – they won’t have to pay if potential buyers don’t see their properties. “Most platforms in Thailand are dominated by agents because [the platforms] want to accumulate listings and charge a listing fee,” Asswisessiwakul contends.

The startup has 30,000 approved listings on its site, of which over 33 percent have been sold or rented.

Thai real estate developers such as LPN, Riche Place, CPLand, and Real Asset have also been using ZmyHome. So far, they’ve sold over US$3 million worth of properties on the site.

LPN director Suwattana Tang says, “we sold almost a hundred units to ZmyHome buyers with over 10 percent conversion, the highest rate among sources.”

Analysis: ZmyHome needs to catch up

Like other marketplaces, the company needs to attain network effects to succeed, meaning it must attract a critical mass of buyers and suppliers. These network effects create high barriers to entry – once many buyers and sellers are using a marketplace, it becomes harder for a new rival to lure them away.