PropertyGuru and 99.co may be rivals, but both want to slay the print giant

When PropertyGuru was founded back in 2007, CEO and co-founder Steve Melhuish had one goal: to help people like himself find properties online. At that time, newspapers were the dominant medium of choice for listing properties, but Melhuish observed that there were large real estate portals in other matured countries such as Japan which were doing extremely well.

Fast forward to 2015, and PropertyGuru is the king of the hill, leading three out of four markets it is in, including Singapore where it owns 85 percent of the market. Despite this, Melhuish is clear that “the job is never finished.” Advertising dollars, he says onstage at Tech in Singapore 2015, are still “sitting offline […] particularly in print.” Ironic, especially since print media consumption has drastically decreased in recent years.

While PropertyGuru was the disruptor eight years ago, it now has to face a handful of smaller players threatening to disrupt it, including 99.co, whose CEO and co-founder Darius Cheung shared the stage with Melhuish. Its focus is on quality – to create a well-designed interface that by its nature incentivizes real estate agents to put up higher quality listings.

Surprisingly, Cheung revealed that PropertyGuru was not the “enemy,” as is widely presumed. Instead, he wants to correct the current “force of habit” that bigger – and more traditional – real estate developers are used to, which is to dump huge sums of cash into offline advertisements.

Towards this end, both companies are aligned in their pursuit of making the user experience as problem-free as possible. Cheung says that, since its latest round of funding, the 99.co team has been “keeping heads down and churning out new features.” Many variables are involved in finding a new home, he explains, and consumers are making sub-par decisions right now because of that. 99.co’s mission, then, is to consider all these variables and make them as favorable as possible for the consumer.

For PropertyGuru, Melhuish has pinpointed low quality listings as a problem on the portal right now. He uses the example of an agent who posted just one photo – which was irrelevant – for a S$10 million (US$7.5 million) property, expressing his amusement at how flippant the agent was being when the sale would bring in roughly S$300,000 (US$225,000) in commissions for him or her.

To combat that, the PropertyGuru team has recently launched a “quality listing algorithm” that would bring high quality information to the top of the list. Melhuish says that they have also started giving agents training for three days a week, and are bringing in Canon to teach them how to take good photographs.

Far from being on opposing ends, this means that PropertyGuru and 99.co are in essence united towards a common cause. The aim really is to break the “addiction” of large property developers who are still living in the past, and provide users with the best possible experience in finding their new homes.

This is part of the coverage of Tech in Asia Singapore 2015, our event running on May 6 and 7.