The PropertyGuru Story, as Told by Co-Founder Steve Melhuish

Co-founders of Propertyguru: Jani Rautiainen (left) and Steve Melhuish (right)

Singapore’s leading online property portal, PropertyGuru, was founded in May 2007 with its site officially launched in the following December. The site is still going strong, and recently it raised more than S$60 million (US$49.1 million) from European property portal group, ImmobilienScout24.

Co-founder Steve Mulhuish looked back on when he relocated to Singapore, which eventually led to the founding of the PropertyGuru Group empire. Prior to his stint in Singapore, he worked in a digital media investment advisory firm and various telecoms companies including Cable & Wireless, where he led a global team. Before coming to Singapore he had been traveling around Southeast Asia for six months, and Asia stood out as the place where he wanted to be. In 2005, Steve’s wife was offered a position in Singapore, and the Melhuish family relocated and called it their home.

Back then, Steve and family were residing in the Orchard area but were forced to move because of an ‘en bloc’ activity in 2006. He found that he had to rely on newspapers to find housing options. He tells me:

At short notice, we had to find a new place to live. And we were fairly new to Singapore, being here a year or so. The first thing I did was to look for property online. But there was nothing [there] so we had to rely on newspapers – it was incredibly frustrating and painful process.

Breaking the rules

In 2006, property was a hot topic among Singaporeans. Steve started to research the industry more, particularly what was happening in the US, Australia and Europe. He learned that the property portal market was really big, with leading firms having market capitalizations of anywhere between one to two billion dollars and running with 60 to 70 percent net profit. He said:

The leading online property portals are like a cash machine, a really good business. I thought that the business model works outside of Singapore, but there was nothing like here.

Singaporeans seemed to be obsessed with property. The feedback from locals was really positive, a sign that there was indeed demand for an online property portal in Singapore. Steve recalled that founding PropertyGuru sort of broke his golden entrepreneur rules of always building a startup in a “big market” and in an “industry that you are passionate about”. He laughs, saying, “I chose Singapore, which is a very small market, and property, which I knew nothing about!”

Steve’s co-founder

Prior to starting PropertyGuru, Steve was running ComiAsia, a startup for uploading, buying, and selling mobile comics. He was running the startup while also working on PropertyGuru.

He then pitched the PropertyGuru idea to one of ComiAsia’s investors, and the investor connected him with Jani Rautiainen, who was also working on the online property portal idea. Jani was based in Singapore but had a weekday job in India. So initially Jani and Steve worked on PropertyGuru for just two days a week.