KUALA LUMPUR, 14 February 2013 - Asia’s leading property portal PropertyGuru expects its Malaysian business to grow more than its Singapore operations in three to four years.
Group CEO Steve Melhuish, said, “We’re growing significantly faster than any property website in Malaysia, which means we have a strong position here. It’s our second largest (market) contributor to the group and it’s strategically important to the business. We will continue to make strong investments in Malaysia and we have long term plans to grow this business.
From 15 percent last year, Malaysia is expected to boost its contribution to the group’s revenue to 20 percent this year.
“We’re still relatively new in Malaysia but it’s one of the most successful markets for us. What we see is that we’re able to join particularly Malaysia and Singapore up together in terms of buyers and advertisers,” said Melhuish.
“There are lots of Malaysians living in Singapore and lots of Singaporeans buying in Malaysia.”
For its Malaysian operations, PropertyGuru’s income streams mainly come from property agents who get annual advertising subscriptions with the portal as well as through advertising campaigns for developers.
The website, PropertyGuru.com.my has over 1.5 million visitors monthly; 3,500 agent subscribers and 170,000 listings — of which 88 percent are residential and 12 percent are commercial.
“The website that generates the most enquiries per visitor is also Malaysia. Traffic has grown 100 percent here in the last 12 months,” said Melhuish.
“We’re seeing an increasing number of people (their buying behaviour) moving from traditional to online, and from online to mobile now. We’ve had 100,000 mobile application downloads in Malaysia so far. In Malaysia, 25 percent of those using our services are using some kind of mobile device, compared with Singapore which is 44 percent.”
As such, PropertyGuru will ramp up its services in order to meet the growing demands for online property search.