SINGAPORE, 5 NOVEMBER 2014 - To help property seekers make their home-hunting journey less stressful and more rewarding, PropertyGuru, Asia's leading property site, launches SmartSelect, a new powerful research tool. SmartSelect is a first-of-its-kind personalised property research engine that takes the guesswork out of property hunting.
Each of PropertyGuru's non-landed property listing is benchmarked against market data from URA or HDB, and its own exclusive database to generate a unique score. This score varies according to property seekers' unique preferences, giving each user a consistent base for comparing property choices.
Based on PropertyGuru's research, Singaporeans take an average of seven months from starting their property search to closing the transaction. This journey typically involves a combination of browsing through properties both online or offline, in-depth research of vast amounts of URA and/or HDB data, careful budgeting and good judgment.
PropertyGuru simplifies this process by automatically benchmarking the specific property listing against market data indices and expressing that into a single score. The portal personalises the property search by weighing this score against customisable criteria such as size, price per square foot, location, tenure and age of the property. The end benefit is a single SmartSelect Score that allows the property seeker to easily research and compare properties within the district - or even in the same block or development.
"SmartSelect is the result of a two-year research and development initiative led by some of the smartest people in the industry," says Lewis Ng, Managing Director of PropertyGuru Group. "Impetus for creating SmartSelect stems from strong consumer insight about the frustrations that people face during the property search and viewing stages of their property hunt. It is PropertyGuru's mission to make the property search process more rewarding for our users and we strongly feel that a focus on consumer-centric innovation is the basis for our market leadership of more than 85% market share in Singapore."
While different consumer segments have different property search preferences, the vast majority wishes to minimise time spent ploughing through heaps of data and charts. SmartSelect avoids this - instead, it does the number-crunching for consumers, a feature that is well-received by consumers that have been involved in development and testing of the product.
"I started my journey with 20-30 listings gathered from online and print sources. A lot of time was spent gathering and understanding market insights across multiple property portals, putting them into excel sheets, before narrowing down to the final five properties. This was no easy feat as my search criteria kept changing; it was laborious and frustrating to say the least. Before making a final decision, the entire process took at least nine months". 42 year old property buyer, Goh Teck Beng, recalled his house hunting process.
"SmartSelect would have definitely made my life easier - I would have all the information I needed in one place. And with personalised SmartSelect scores for each of my shortlisted properties, I could rank and view them starting with the one with the highest score."
Since its inception in 2006, PropertyGuru has been revolutionising the property search experience with product innovations such as being the first in the market for property mobile apps. The website has also improved the search algorithm as seen through the introduction of the recent quality score system, giving higher-quality property listings priority in the search results. These have enabled the company to achieve a strong leadership in the Singapore market with 3.5 million property seekers viewing over 210,000 property listings monthly. PropertyGuru is confident that SmartSelect will set new standards for property search in Singapore and will help give an edge ahead of the competition.
At a Glance
PropertyGuru's SmartSelect is an industry-first, personalised property research engine that takes the property seeker beyond traditional property search:
1. Set your unique property preferences
2. See how the engine automatically compares the properties against URA or HDB data, and exclusive PropertyGuru listing data, and weighs the outcomes against your personal preferences
3. Read your SmartSelect Score and see how it ranks versus your selected properties.
The end benefit is a more rewarding search process and better property decisions. To see how this personalized property research engine works, go to www.PropertyGuru.com.sg/smartselect
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For more queries, contact:
Rachel Lim Hill+Knowlton Strategies 6390 3315 rachel.lim@hkstrategies.com | Christopher Sim Hill+Knowlton Strategies 6390 3349 christopher.sim@hkstrategies.com
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NOTES TO EDITOR
About PropertyGuru Group
PropertyGuru Group is Asia's leading online property portal group used by more than 11 million property buyers, viewing over 90 million property pages and generating over 350,000 enquiries for 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 2013, the Group recorded 1,357,946 downloaded mobile apps, resulting in a slew of three MOBEX awards sweep. 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 received 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.
PropertyGuru offices in the region include: