PropertyGuru gobbles up Indonesian real estate portal RumahDijual

(Image via Wikimedia)

Earlier today, Singaporean startup PropertyGuru announced it has acquired one of Indonesia’s largest real estate portals RumahDijaul for an undisclosed sum. The deal is the latest of PropertyGuru’s acquisition sequence in Southeast Asia. It comes not long after the firm snapped up ePropertyTrack in July, following a S$175 million (US$124 million) investment in June from a consortium of three backers including Emtek, one of Indonesia’s largest media companies. The island nation is PropertyGuru’s second biggest market in terms of traffic.

Founded by Indonesian Yohanes Aristianto, RumahDijual translates to English as “house for sale,” which makes the site almost priceless in terms of search engine optimization in Indonesia. The acquisition of RumahDijual, coupled with PropertyGuru’s Rumah, emboldens the group to now claim market leadership in Indonesia.

The group says 43 percent of all time spent on property portals in Indonesia is accumulated on PropertyGuru, almost double that of its closest competitor, which we know to be iProperty Group’s Rumah123. Rumah and RumahDijual now claim combined traction of 5.5 million users and 30.2 million monthly page views in Indonesia.

Steve Melhuish, co-founder and CEO of PropertyGuru

See: PropertyGuru announces joint venture with Indonesian media company Emtek“Indonesia is strategically important for PropertyGuru because it is the largest, and one of the fastest growing property and digital markets in Southeast Asia,” says Steve Melhuish, CEO and co-founder of PropertyGuru. “Together with our local partner, Emtek, we have earmarked tens of millions of dollars in the coming years to bring further innovations to the Indonesian market [and] help solidify our market leadership.”

The online property industry is one of the first tech spaces to see large scale consolidation in the region. iProperty Group and PropertyGuru are the dominant real estate forces by far in nearly all the big six ASEAN markets, with both groups snapping up the smaller property portals faster than Duke Nukem can chew bubble gum. Earlier this year, Rocket Internet’s Lamudi acquired PropertyKita in Indonesia, although it is still very much a second tier contender behind iProperty and PropertyGuru.

PropertyGuru’s upside opportunity in Indonesia is promising. The archipelago has potential to become a high-demand market driven by a booming population growth, an emerging middle class, rapid urbanization, and increasing mobile internet consumption. PropertyGuru acquired RumahDijual as it had around 500,000 listings across the major islands in the archipelago.