Southeast Asian property portal giant PropertyGuru Group has today announced that it has entered into an agreement to buy the Malaysian housing data company MyProperty Data. The move comes two years after the portal company first started working with MyProperty Data on its mortgage pre-approval product and will see Managing Director Joe Thor and his team fully incorporated into Property Guru Group operations to build out the portal’s offering in Malaysia.
Speaking about his company’s new acquisition, Manav Kamboj, Chief Technology Officer, PropertyGuru Group said:
“Over the next few months, we will be investing substantially to expand MyProperty Data’s offerings and it will also entail growing the team with data scientists, engineers, product managers, sales and marketing experts. We look forward to serving over 5 million home seekers who rely on PropertyGuru every month to find, finance, and own their home with greater confidence.”
MyProperty Data reportedly has over 6 million unique records covering sales, auctions, new developments as well as demographic information and location information. The synergies that this sort of data with a leading property portal have been seen before across the world as companies such as Zoopla and VivaReal and more recently CoStar have bought up data companies to enhance their existing tools and products and build out new ones both for the end-user and for agents. In seeking to add information and transparency around its portal listings PropertyGuru is betting that users in Malaysia’s notoriously opaque property market will increasingly demand a higher level of trust in what they are viewing, a point alluded to by Joe Hock Thor, Managing Director, MyPropertyData:
“This acquisition advances the goal we share with PropertyGuru – empowering Malaysians with accurate transaction data, so that they neither overpay nor underpay when making decisions.”
