Tight battle on top & interesting movements below
It was in December last year when I did my first analysis on the property portals situation in Indonesia. Let’s check the current figures and how is changed since then. Just an estimation from SimilarWeb as always:
As a reminder: Rumah123.com is part of the REA Group (iProperty) while RumahDijual.com and Rumah.com are owned by PropertyGuru Group. While 99.coacquired and redirected UrbanIndo to their main domain, so their traffic is split between Indonesia (44%) and Singapore (45%) aprox.
The battle in the top three remains very tight, with a possible loss in traffic of 6% for Rumah123 and a 17% for a RumahDijual. While behind them we have the interesting increase from 99.co and Lamudi.co.id with a big boost in traffic of a 128%. Their bounce rate has gone up in a 22% but even so, they’ve surely been working in traffic acquisition.
Lifull.id is my new addition to the ranking, since I’ve seen they’ve acquired and redirected the small portal rumahrumah.co.id to boost their domain. Lifull is a Japanese property giant who acquired Trovit and Mitula (including DotProperty), the worldwide leading property aggregators from Spain. So worth keeping an eye on them ;)
The role of property portals in emerging markets
I believe that portals are not just about monetization. They can play an interesting role to improve real estate markets in transparency and trustworthiness. And Indonesia probably is not so mature in terms of regulations and rules for the real estate professionals. So would be interesting to see a portal steeping up and helping the industry.
An idea could be to create a real estate agent certification program to educate agents into doing things better. And in exchange, include that as a ranking factor in the portal, so agents with the certification can get more leads, and customers a better service from them.
I’ve seen something similar in Dubai with Property Finder’s verified listings, where this portal started to verify listing documents to improve trust. Later on the official authorities took their lead and implement something alike.
Could these kind of initiatives make sense in Southeast Asia? Food for thought ;)
Note: Please take these figures just as a reference from a 3rd party data provider
