How online classifieds are on the verge of a shake-up in Southeast Asia

Darius Cheung is the founder of 99.co, a Singapore apartment rental search company.

The Property Portal Watch Conference was held in May for the first time in Singapore, and it’s one of many signs that classifieds in Southeast Asia is heating up to become an exciting arena again. Classifieds typically focuses on properties, cars, jobs, and horizontal “anything goes” marketplaces like Craigslist.

It produced some of the most valuable Southeast Asian startups in the last two decades – household names like iProperty, PropertyGuru, SGCarMart, OneShift, JobStreet and JobsCentral. Gorillas such as iProperty and JobStreet grew to US$500 million in market cap each.

While Craigslist has not taken root in Southeast Asia in the horizontal space, eBay has quietly but clearly stepped up its investment in Gumtree’s market presence, and rising stars like Carousell (disclaimer: the author is an investor in the startup) have grown rapidly by capturing the fundamental shifts in user behaviour and building for a mobile-first experience.

The man behind the global conference, Simon Baker (former CEO of REA Group in Australia, a $5.5B mammoth, and former chairman of iProperty group), explained why he brought the event to Asia: “Over the last 15 years I have operated and invested in property portals around the world from Australia, to Europe, to South America and to Asia. I think the Southeast Asian market has some exciting opportunities and provides the owners and operators of property portals with significant upside as property portals become the first choice for real estate marketing.”

Here’re some interesting developments from the conference:

1. Launch of Frontier Digital Ventures (FDV)

Launched in May by the team behind iProperty – Shaun Di Gregorio serves as FDV’s CEO, Patrick Grove and Luke Elliot are FDV investors and sit on the board – the investment firm focuses solely on classifieds and on pre-emerging and frontier markets such as Pakistan. Frontier Digital apparently takes an operational investment approach by giving strategic direction and operational guidance on top of funding.

2. Diakrit is the future of real estate visualization tools

Diakrit showcased an advanced suite of real estate visualization tools, the D-Navigator 5.0, which is far more advanced than most of the technology deployed in the region.

What’s interesting is that Diakrit is a 350-strong, 13-year old Swedish company in which over 200 staff are reportedly in Thailand. The company is part of the rising trend of having founding roots and senior management in the western world, but with the bulk of their work done in an offshore center in some parts of Asia.

3. Shift away from broker-driven marketplaces

The conference raised the question of how real estate marketplaces are fundamentally changing. Traditionally, customers in newspaper classifieds and recent internet portals have been the brokers and agents.

Buyers, sellers, renters, and landlords rarely deal directly with one another because there were many processes they were not familiar with. But that is slowly changing as classifieds become more sophisticated by providing more tools to users.

So if classifieds move towards a crowd-driven future, will brokers continue to be relevant? How would they redefine themselves in the internet era? Do owners market their own ‘products’ better?

For-sale-by-owner site Boliga has proven that, at least in the Danish market, owners actually do a better job of selling their houses, and at a lower cost. Boliga has taken five percent market share within a year, and it anticipates growing to 10 percent by the end of 2014.

4. HipFlat from Thailand

5. Next from Japan demos augmented reality property search