SINGAPORE, 6 February 2015 – PropertyGuru is pleased to announce a strong start to 2015 with the highest number of monthly visits in Singapore in January. The number of consumer enquiries for January also increased 16% in on a YoY basis. This happened despite Singapore residential property market experiencing a slowdown for the past six quarters, with a 51.8% decline in private property transactions in 2014.
The record-breaking January traffic follows the highest annual market share achieved for PropertyGuru in 2014 at 87% (source: ComScore1), ending the last quarter with 88% of all visits to property portals in Singapore. On a monthly basis, PropertyGuru continues to record over four million consumer visits and 52 million page views – in Singapore alone.
“We’re really proud of these results,” says Steve Melhuish, CEO of PropertyGuru Group, “and we’d like to see them as the consumer rewarding us for our relentless innovation towards new and beneficial services to them. In the past 12 months, we launched over eight major products and enhancements to help consumers make better property decisions. These included mobile app improvements (2 million downloads to-date), launching a floor plans database to improve property listings, a new listing quality ranking algorithm, SmartSelect for easier property comparison and introduction of a whole suite of financing tools and calculators. Our strong position in market also means we deliver far more leads to our customers than any other property portal,” Steve goes on to add.
The Company just published its latest Property Market Outlook 2015. “The report aims to help property seekers find some direction in an uncertain market,” says Steve. In the document, PropertyGuru shows that there is a strong positive correlation between enquiries on its website and the actual volume of sales transactions in market. The company estimates that property prices will continue to slide, while volumes for private non-landed may pick up in the second half of the year. “The analysis also proves that there’s a fantastic opportunity for growth if we start to leverage our ‘Big data’ for a next wave of consumer-driven innovation. We will have more exciting news on that front in months to come,” Steve concludes.
1ComScore is the industry-standard for traffic information, and takes into account only players with more than 50,000 monthly unique visitors.
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About PropertyGuru Group
PropertyGuru Group is Asia’s leading online property group used by more than 10 million property buyers, viewing over 90 million property pages, over 1 million properties and generating over 400,000 enquiries for over 30,000 real estate developer and agent advertisers – every month – across Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. The Group has developed and launched 15 mobile applications in four countries and three languages. At the end of 2014, the Group recorded over two million downloaded mobile apps, and won first position in the property category for the “Digital Media of The Year 2014” award organised by Marketing Magazine. Headquartered in Singapore, PropertyGuru was founded in 2006 by two entrepreneurs with a vision to simplify the property search process and help buyers, sellers and investors make better property decisions faster. Taking advantage of Asia’s growing affluence, property demand and online explosion, the company is market leader in Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia, receiving its first VC investment funding in 2008 and secured approximately $60m investment in 2012 from Deutsche Telekom, South East Asia’s largest digital investment to date. PropertyGuru was also the first to integrate its website with social media, first to launch Singapore’s only dedicated property newspaper – read by more than 100,000 readers island-wide every month – and it has also developed a property events platform, with approximately 30 shows held annually across four countries, addressing 30,000 potential property buyers on the ground.
ABOUT STEVE MELHUISH
Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Steve is an award-winning entrepreneur. In the last two decades, Steve built profitable companies throughout Asia and Europe. In 2006 along with his partner Jani Rautiainen, founded PropertyGuru. Under the auspice of this newly established brand, PropertyGuru provided a one-stop online shop for the listing and sale of residential and commercial properties to individual and institutional buyers and investors. Prior to Steve’s current role, he held executive positions in various multinational firms including Skype, AOL, Virgin Media, Vodafone, Extreme Media, iPass and Ariadne Capital. Steve’s expertise in leading global teams resulted in a US$500 million turnover for a business unit for Cable & Wireless. In 2007, Steve was awarded the Spirit of Enterprise Award in recognition of his contributions to entrepreneurship in Singapore. Steve is a non-executive director for one other firm and an angel investor. He frequently gives public talks on digital media, entrepreneurship and the real estate market.