PropertyGuru Goes Commercial With Offshoot

From the company behind online real estate site PropertyGuru and online independent mortgage broker LoanGuru comes a new web property that focuses just on the commercial real estate space: CommercialGuru. Just officially launched earlier today by Allproperty Media Pte. Ltd, it already features over 7,000 commercial properties for sale and rent with detailed information about each property, including maps and photos.

These properties were ported over from PropertyGuru’s commercial section where prior to CommercialGuru, there were “already 40,000 users viewing 500,000 pages per month,” said Steve Melhuish, CEO of Allproperty Media.

CommercialGuru.

Now, clicking on the Search button in the Commercial section of PropertyGuru brings one straight to CommercialGuru.

In an interview with ZDNet Asia, Chief Marketing Officer Winnie Khoo said that “the site is not expected to be profitable within the next 12 months. . . . the company expects to spend a total of S$1 million (US$737,137) before the site is in the black. The company spent S$300,000 (US$221,141) during the six-month research and IT development period, as well as another S$300,000 on marketing.”

This means that the company is expecting a monthly burn rate of about SGD 33K (1M – 600K = 400K to be spent over the next 12 months) – perhaps to finance a team of 5-7 business development and sales people with some money set aside for additional marketing expenses? To break even after 12 months, the company must aim to bring in an average monthly revenue of more than SGD 80K.