The three main contenders are pushing the leader
It’s been already a long time since my last analysis of the leading portals in Singapore, so let’s check what’s the current situation. As always, traffic estimations by Similarweb so please take it just as a reference:
As expect PropertyGuru remains in the top, but we can see how the three main contenders have increased their traffic in a 20-30%. But careful! Check the bounce rates as well. There is an increase of 23% in bounce rate for 99.co, leaving their metric in 73% which is extremely high. While we don’t know if it’s for Singapore and Indonesia, since they still have everything under the same domain after acquiring UrbanIndo.
EdgeProp increased their traffic in a 25% but their bounce rate went up a 12%, not so good but better than 99.co. SRX had the healthiest increase in traffic with a 23%, while keeping a similar bounce rate. Although SRX’s bounce rate is still higher than EdgeProp’s.
We all want more traffic to our sites but traffic that converts, otherwise there is no point. Increasing visits is not difficult with paid display campaigns, but could be a waste in we are not targeting people in-market or if the audience is too high in the conversion funnel.
99.co’s search intent vs landing page issue
99.co has a good product, I’d say in several aspects better than PropertyGuru. But I still find surprising that they don’t give enough priority to SEO. They are doing basic mistakes like this one that I’d like to point out.
If I search for “condos for sale in bukit merah”, I land on this page:
My search was totally transactional as from someone already in the decision phase of the conversion funnel. Yet the landing page on 99.co is informational, talking about the places of interest, eating, lifestyle and so on. While transactional users what they’d like at this point is to see listings right away and an easy way to filter them.
But why is Google showing their informational page for a transactional search? Because apparently 99.co doesn’t have an optimized transactional landing pages combining property type and area. Something basic to attract high converting traffic.
Doing this right, they’d surely increase their rankings and conversion rate in a short time. If they want to win the property portal war, being strong in search engines is a must, while right now they are quite weak.
Hybrid players on the rise
Mogul.sg and Oh My Home are two players that they weren’t on my list before because they are not traditional property portals, since they have their own agents or preferred agent partners. But I wanted to include them because I think they are already playing an interesting part on the property market in Singapore.
They can both already be in the top 10 property portals in Singapore in traffic estimation, although their metrics are not so good with very high bounce rates. But they do have potential to take a good piece of the market, doing things right on the marketing side.
Waiting for iProperty and DotProperty
iProperty and DotProperty are two players with big groups behind and potentially enough resources to cause an impact Singapore. But no big movements form them yet.
iProperty is investing in traffic acquisition but with an estimated 71% bounce rate, we can guess their performance is not so good in terms of lead generation. While DotProperty is still in a very early stage to be relevant.
Anyway we’ll see how all of this evolves during the year ;)
