People in Singapore are getting a bad deal in property search. This startup wants to fix that

Property search in Singapore is like a mirage. Yes, sites like PropertyGuru and iProperty are popular among Singaporean property seekers and real estate agents, but they’re more like online classifieds than true-blue search engines like Google. And there lies the fundamental problem.

“This [market] is where you advertise to win. You pay to get yourself to the top of the game. This is how you get more links and more views and more calls,” says Darius Cheung, CEO and founder of 99.co, a Singapore startup that’s offering a different – and some may say purer – take on property search.

“Search results are sacred to us. You can never buy search results. That’s something we promise consumers. That’s something we promise the industry we’re working with.”

Property agents at 99.co’s official launch event told me about their frustrations with PropertyGuru. They say that the dominant property site has been charging them more and more to list. Today, a “lite” plan costs S$320 (US$246) for six months, while an “elite” plan can fetch up to S$2,240 (US$1,726) a year.

This business model apparently causes problems. For real estate agents, it widens the gulf between the haves and have-nots. Top agents keep paying to ensure that they stay on top of the search results. Meanwhile, new agents who’ve just entered the industry are left scraping the bottom of the barrel in an upward climb. It creates an arms race where agents outdo one another, causing business costs to rise. These costs are then passed down to consumers. And who gets to benefit from all this? PropertyGuru.

Cheung claims that this pay-to-list model harms the property seeker’s experience. Search results become compromised, and often show properties that aren’t even relevant.

While not a scientific comparison, I did a search that shows the night and day differences between both sites. The search term was “Sun Plaza”, a shopping mall and condominium in northern Singapore. First up, PropertyGuru:

The most relevant result shows up fifth. The first one is a condo that’s one to two train stations away. The third and fourth result were pretty spot on. Damningly, the second item is a condo that’s in another side of Singapore.

Now, on to 99.co. The homepage has an Google-Airbnb-esque feel to it, and users immediately know what to do. No guidance is needed. Keying in part of the search term brings up a list of options, and the right one was on top.

After I hit ‘search’, I was led to a map-based results page showing all the available properties around Sun Plaza. “This is without a doubt the future. If you look at any property portal anywhere else in the world that is a developed country, this is what it looks like. For some reason Singapore isn’t there, and I don’t know why,” Cheung says of its search interface.

The race is on, again