PropertyGuru is on top in Singapore. Here’s what it’s doing to stay there

Online property classifieds is in a constant state of flux here in Southeast Asia. PropertyGuru and iProperty are vying for dominance in the region. New players like 99.co and UrbanIndo have a few things to say about how property search should be done. Then there are forces beyond their control, such as a cooling property market in Singapore.

Yet, PropertyGuru‘s business appears to be stable in Singapore despite the circumstances. According to its calculations, derived from comScore data, the site has achieved 90 percent market share in the country in terms of the total time people spend on the site. Data from Alexa and SimilarWeb also place PropertyGuru ahead of competitors like iProperty and STProperty.

Meanwhile, aggregate inquiries made to agents on the site have surged since 2012 despite public housing transactions stagnating and private housing transactions being sliced in half.

Steve Melhuish, co-founder and CEO of PropertyGuru, spoke to Tech in Asia following 99.co’s launch in Singapore in November. At the event, founder Darius Cheung pointed out the weaknesses of sites like PropertyGuru, saying that they tend to compromise the quality of search results because agents essentially pay to get the best placements.

Melhuish, however, said that the truth is much more nuanced. Properties are ranked first and foremost on a quality score. “A poor quality listing gets ranked lower than a higher quality listing now. Time still plays a factor, so if an agent uploads a high quality listing more recently than someone else with a high quality listing then the more recent listing will prevail,” he says.

Another complaint that surfaced was that agents were paying more and more to list on PropertyGuru. But the rate the site charges is still much less than what newspaper classifieds offer.

“PropertyGuru’s agent subscription packages equate to a maximum price of S$0.35/listing per day – this is one-hundredth of the cost of advertising in newspapers, which cost S$35 (US$27) for three lines of print. Seven years ago, almost 100 percent of all advertising was in newspaper with agents typically spending S$5,000 (US$3,860) per annum there, says Melhuish, adding that agents pay the site as low as S$630 (US$486) a year to advertise.

The company has also introduced a few new features to enhance the information that it gives property buyers. It has digitized 170,000 floor plans for both private and public housing, which is the majority of its 210,000 listed properties.

PropertyGuru’s latest trick though is SmartSelect, a research tool that scores properties based on what users value the most. It consists of sliders for consumers to prioritize qualities like price, location, area size, age of property, and so on. The system then culls data from HDB and URA (government agencies in charge of public housing and urban planning respectively), as well as its own database, to come up with a list of properties.