Photo: Marketing Interactive
Riding on the high smartphone adoption in Asia, PropertyGuru’s mobile app won the Gold Award for the Best Mobile App – Media Owner category at the Mob-Ex Awards 2016, held on Thursday (18 Feb) in Singapore.
The group beat out bigger companies for the title. Within the same category, MEASAT Broadcast Network System won Silver, and The Business Times received the Bronze Award.
The accolade aims to recognize media-owned apps that provide convenience, entertainment or education to users, while increasing brand proposition and subscription.
Commenting, Steve Melhuish, co-founder and CEO of PropertyGuru, said: “We are very pleased to be awarded Gold. With the newly revamped app, we are directly meeting the needs of consumers in Asia who want to access property information in an easy, digestible format via their mobile devices.”
PropertyGuru revamped its consumer mobile app last September across its four markets – Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore.
In a statement, the group said “this was done to cater to a growing market of users who are increasingly reliant on mobile rather than desktop devices to search, locate and secure suitable properties to rent, buy or sell.”
According to a global study from Google, Asia has gone mobile-first. Singapore leads the pack with 85 percent of its population adopting mobile search.
Just two months after going “live”, PropertyGuru recorded a 25 percent increase in new downloads for the refreshed app and a 31 percent growth in the number of page views.
“Our app provides instantaneous access to 1.3 million property listings across all our four markets with a single tap on a screen. The app has grown from being a strategic complement to desk and mobile web platforms to become the foremost generator of leads for our business,” revealed Melhuish.
PropertyGuru stated that the revamped app contributed to a 54 percent growth in leads.
In Singapore, PropertyGuru recorded a 29 percent spike in user downloads, giving rise to more than 820,000 users by the end of October 2015. This translates to almost one in every three Singapore residents between 20 to 64 years old having the app in their mobile devices, noted the group, citing data from the Department of Statistics.
It added that the majority of new users are aged 25 to 34 years old, looking to buy their first property, to rent or to upgrade as they get married and start families.
Romesh Navaratnarajah, Senior Editor at PropertyGuru, wrote this story. To contact him about this or other stories email romesh@propertyguru.com.sg
