Real estate portal The Edge Property nets $4m funding from angels

Tower blocks under construction in Tiong Bahru, Singapore. Photo credit: Dinukshan Kuruppu.

Online real estate portal The Edge Property has secured US$4 million from several angel investors. According to a press release, the funding will be used to optimize the portal’s features and further expand its reach.

Launched by Malaysian entrepreneur Tong Kooi Ong in July 2015, The Edge Property offers prospective buyers, sellers, developers, and investors in Malaysia and Singapore a service which combines real estate listings with in-house and syndicated news content. It also provides a variety of data and analytics features, including a property valuation tool.

The company claims that The Edge Property has grown from 50,000 users per month when it commenced operations to 600,000 today across both countries, though its press release doesn’t indicate if this refers to registered users, monthly active users, or some other measure. Among the portal’s key competitors in Malaysia is iProperty – which was acquired in a US$413 million deal by Rupert Murdoch’s REA Group in late 2015 – and 99.co and PropertyGuru in Singapore.

The online portal is part of the wider The Edge media group, which also comprises business and financial news site The Edge Markets, as well as print publications The Edge Financial Daily and The Edge Singapore, among others.

The company’s press release indicates that this most recent round of funding specifically concerns The Edge Property. Hsieh Fu Hua, chairman of Singapore’s United Overseas Bank; Nazir Razak, chairman of Malaysia’s CIMB bank; Peter Goh, vice president of ASEAN Systems Sales at Oracle; and GK Goh affiliate Fushia Investments, are among the investors that participated.

Previously, The Edge also published The Malaysian Insider, which shut down in March last year allegedly because the country’s government had pressured brand owners not to advertise with the news website. The Insider had carried coverage that was seen as highly critical of the government’s handling of the 1MDB sovereign fund scandal, in which several hundred million dollars of donations were apparently deposited into private bank accounts linked to Malaysian prime minster Najib Razak.

Two other group titles, The Edge Weekly and The Edge Financial Daily, were suspended from being published for three months by the Malaysian government in July 2015 over their 1MDB coverage.

(Corrections: Detail on some of The Edge Property’s competitors has been added to the original article. The original article described Peter Goh as president of ASEAN Systems Sales at Oracle. That is now corrected.)