SINGAPORE, 3 January 2013 – PropertyGuru Group, Asia’s dominant market leader for online residential and commercial property search, is pleased to announce two key appointments within its Singapore B2C and B2B marketing teams to augment its recent business wins and sustained growth.
Melvin Kwok, Head of Consumer Marketing, SingaporeMelvin brings with him more than 16 years marketing experience across a wide spectrum of media organizations, such as MediaCorp, Publicis, Dentsu and Kingsmen. His brand experiences include ChannelNewsAsia.com, Mocca.com, City Development and Canon among other household brands. In his previous role as Senior Marketing Manager with MediaCorp, he marketed News, Radio and Print interactive platforms with great success. Melvin’s new responsibility at PropertyGuru Singapore is to spearhead all consumer targeted initiatives and engagement activities, branding, public relations and events marketing to further develop PropertyGuru’s brand strategy, perception and market share in Singapore.
Keith Cheong, Head of Sales Strategy & Trade Marketing, Corporate Business Group, SingaporeKeith has amassed more than 16 years of television broadcast and digital marketing experience where he led sponsorship, content and format syndication business units at AXN Asia, SPH MediaWorks and MediaCorp Studios. Since 2007, Keith assumed digital leadership roles with iHub Media where he drove sales strategy and social media initiatives for the Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines and China markets, partnering premiere web publishers like Facebook, Microsoft, ESPN, Friendster, among other portals. As Head of Sales Strategy & Trade Marketing under PropertyGuru’s Corporate Business Group, Keith will steer marketing initiatives in support of revenue growth and industry engagement objectives for developer and advertiser sales, The PropertyGuru Newspaper and LoanGuru.
Steve Melhuish, Co-Founder and Group Chief Executive Officer of PropertyGuru who led an extended executive search to support the PropertyGuru team said, "Melvin’s and Keith’s appointments highlight our commitment to strengthening our growing presence with the addition of talented individuals. The fresh insights they bring will indeed complement the existing expertise of the team to ensure that PropertyGuru continues to experience rapid growth for traffic, content, and brand awareness whilst exploring new areas of opportunity in 2013.”
ENDS
About PropertyGuruHeadquartered in Singapore,
PropertyGuru was co-founded in 2006 as a self-funded company, with a vision to make the property search process a breeze for buyers, sellers and investors. Taking advantage of Asia’s growing affluence for property and the online boom, it received its first VC investment funding in 2008. Since then, the company has grown rapidly, reaping profits and positive cashflow in 2009 and doubling revenue growth in 2011.
PropertyGuru is now Asia’s leading online property portal group, with a high-volume of online real estate presence across nine territories in Asia, including offices in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and partnerships with leading property websites in Australia, Hong Kong, India, Vietnam and China. It has a current inventory of electronic-driven properties including 82 million property pages with 500,000 residential and commercial properties listings from 200 developers to attract 9.3 million buyers and 25,000 paying real estate agent subscribers and developer advertisers, generating close to 300,000 advertiser enquiries monthly.
To date, PropertyGuru has also created 12 mobile applications in 4 countries and 3 languages which garnered 400,000 mobile application downloads, is the first to integrate website with social media as well as circulate Singapore’s only dedicated property print publication with dispersion outreach of over 3,500 key locations island-wide.
Executive BiographySteve Melhuish, Co-Founder and Group Chief Executive Officer
Steve is an award-winning entrepreneur.
For the last two decades, Steve built profitable companies throughout Asia and Europe and in 2006 along with his partner Jani Rautiainen, founded PropertyGuru Group.
Under the auspices of this newly established holding group, PropertyGuru.com.sg was started with the aim of providing a one-stop online shop for the listing and sale of residential properties to individual and institutional home buyers and investors respectively.
Prior to Steve’s current role, he held executive positions in various venture capital firms including Skype, AOL, Virgin Media, Vodafone, Extreme Media, iPass and Ariadne Capital. In all, 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 two other firms, an angel investor and member of the Business Angels Network South East Asia.
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