Mitula & Trovit’s presence in this region
After my analysis on the main property portals expanding in SEA, this time I’d like to look into vertical search engines. They’ve been co-existing with portals for years and specially two of them, Mitula and Trovit, have been extremely successful.
When Trovit was born, I was in Barcelona very close from the smart and hard working people who built it (we worked together at Enalquiler.com). And I witnessed the rise of Mitula in Madrid. Difficult to think back then what they would achieve and years later, they were acquired by LIFULL for around €80 and €118 million respectively. Huge success.
Now it’s unclear what will happen after those acquisitions and with Dot Property in the middle (bought by Mitula in 2016). But let’s check what are their current figures in SEA, visits estimation by Similarweb:
We can see clearly how Indonesia seems to be the best market for both of them with 2.4 million estimated visits for Trovit and 2.7 for Mitula. Second would be Philippines with 675K and 298K respectively, quite surprising, could be because of the lesser competition on search engines. And Thailand/Malaysia would be next with fairly good numbers.
In Vietnam both of them have minor presence, which could be a good opportunity for others since I think it is a very interesting market already. There is a Mitula in Myanmar, while none of them are in Laos or Cambodia. Dot Property has sites in all these countries so boosting them could make sense for LIFULL. Although we are talking about frontier or early stage emerging markets.
Additional players
I don’t know many other property aggregators beyond Trovit and Mitula, besides the successful Nestoria and Nuroa, both acquired by Mitula long time ago. But I’m sure there are more out there and I’d like to highlight two that I’ve known recently:
The Rubrikk Group is a vertical search engine with headquarters in Oslo and presence already in 23 countries. I believe their growth model is based on partnerships with big news groups. In Southeast Asia they are in Vietnam through Vietnam+, advertising almost 1.3 million properties. Promising project, we’ll see how they grow the upcoming years.
Nestpick is an aggregator for furnished apartments, rooms and student accommodation worldwide, with headquarters in Berlin. Backed up by the giant Rocket Internet, they have presence in several SEA cities like Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Manila and Singapore. With a total traffic estimation of 1.2 million visits per month, looks an interesting project as well.
