This content was created by Max Brun. This content was uploaded by Max Brun. This is a YouTube clip titled "An Overview Of PropertyGuru As Asia's Leading Property Marketplace (Viveck Chat Clip)" (posted 2021-11-20). The excerpt is an interview-style segment where an interviewer (SPEAKER A) prompts Viveck to describe PropertyGuru. Viveck explains the company as a Southeast Asian property marketplace active in five markets (Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand), highlights marketplace fundamentals (supply/demand liquidity, match rate as the North Star), describes a five-part product framework (acquiring quality listings and consumers, enabling discovery, providing pricing/location insights to aid decisions, and retention), and contrasts scaling challenges across regulated versus fragmented markets.
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It might be a little bit helpful if you can give us an overview though of PropertyGuru as a marketplace and maybe touch on some of the unique aspects of it too. Yeah.
So PropertyGuru as a marketplace is a highly infrequent product, which is on properties. I see my customers once in 10 years or once in 7 years, and the rental customers come to me every 1 and 2 years to 4 years, depending on how they want to turn out their rental. So we are, as I said, we are present in 5 markets, What's interesting is, and we are honored to be in a position where we are the leading marketplace in 3 out of these 5 markets, which is basically if across Southeast Asia we're the leading prop tech, but if you were to look at it again, the 5 markets, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, we are the market leaders and Indonesia and Thailand is emerging story for us. So that's kind of interesting as to we started in Singapore and then pervaded into the rest of the country. So what made us go through is that I think the fundamentals of marketplace matters a lot here, which is just about focus on liquidity, ensure that your coverage is intact on the supply side, and ensure that your liquidity of demand is intact. And I think that is all you need to get the flywheel spinning. As long as you can recreate— you can create this in one city and multiply this across multiple cities, you're kind of nailing the game. So if I were to just put this in a simple framework or simple playbook, before I joined, we were actually leaders in Singapore, and post the team transition, then we kind of got into Vietnam, and then we were able to secure the position in Malaysia as well. But what made us extremely successful in Singapore was just that the value was provided and the value was provided just through liquidity of supply and demand. It's as simple as that. So if I were to architect this for you, I call this internally the core purpose of our marketplace is matchmaking. We're much like Tinder, to be honest. Where one consumer dates multiple properties and one property dates multiple consumers, eventually then for them to matchmake. And the question is, how do you solve the match? How do you improve the match rate as a platform? So we have 5 ladders that we look at from a product perspective which helps us get there. So we acquire the right listings and the right consumers, we ensure that the quality of the listings are good and the quality of consumers. What I mean by quality of consumers are We kind of ensure that we know what the consumer really wants, what their preference is. The third is how do we enable discovery of consumers of the right listings. Fourth is we give them an insight around, okay, so Mike was able to, let's say, find the property of his choice. We knew what Mike really wanted and that was available on the property and And then I'm giving Mike all the discovery tools like search and recommendation engine to find the property. And the fourth is, uh, when Mike is staring at a property, how do I convince him that this is the right thing for him to— or right or not the right thing for him to do? So we give pricing insights, location insights for Mike to take a decision on whether this is the right property to go or not. And all throughout the journey, we ensure that the retention is in place. That's kind of the architecture we look at. So our core North Star is match rate, and that's what we've solved towards. Now look, I think besides this, I can just touch upon another thing. Now what makes a property market very interesting is in my days of PayPal, what I've realized is scaling the platform is pretty— it is hard, but it is relatively easy because the front end of PayPal, whether you work from US or you from India or Australia, it's going to look the same. The backend is where we do a bunch of heavy lifting with compliance and risk management and so on and so forth. With prop tech, it's not so. My 5 markets are a bit different. In Singapore, it's very regulated, it's much like the US, you've got best-in-class data, you've got best-in-class agent, but in Thailand and Indonesia, it's very fragmented, it's unregulated, people come in and go as agents. So How do you then create a product that can scale across markets is a big question.
