IQI, the company that runs juwai.com and juwai.asia, has today announced a merger with prominent Malaysian real estate agency RINA Group. The merger will see RINA Group’s 1000 employees integrate with Juwai IQI’s staff and adopt the IQI brand.
We recently reported on Juwai IQI’s launch of juwai.asia, a new portal designed to connect Asian buyers to properties around the world. This latest deal for the third largest agency group in Malaysia makes sense for the Hong Kong based company as it will give them more clout in a local market that is seeing increasing numbers of properties sold to foreign buyers, especially those from other Asian countries.
The merger with IQI also makes sense for RINA Group who will get access to IQI’s technology as well as the leads generated by by the new portal. RINA Group CEO Jordan Yeoh (pictured above), who as a result of the merger will become Vice President of IQI, said:
“By joining IQI, we are giving our agents access to the Juwai IQI technology-enabled platform. Technology is already playing a much bigger role in real estate because of the pandemic, and this role will grow quickly in the years to come.”
The merger of a foreign portal company and a big local real estate group is bound to cause a few ripples in the Malaysian market and it will be interesting to see if it heralds more mergers between the portal company and other South East Asian regional agency players.