SINGAPORE (Yosefardi) – PropertyGuru Group, Asia’s leading online property portal group, has acquired RumahDijual.com, one of Indonesia’s leading property websites, for an undisclosed amount.
This comes on the back of its latest acquisition of leading new project marketing solution, ePropertyTrack, in July, following a S$175 million investment from a strategic consortium of three investors including Emtek Group — Indonesia’s largest media group — in June.
Founded by Indonesian Yohanes Aristianto, RumahDijual literally means “house for sale.” The acquisition of RumahDijual.com, coupled with PropertyGuru’s Rumah.com site, has cemented the Group’s market leadership in the country.
It means that 43% of all time spent on property portals in Indonesia is now spent with PropertyGuru, almost double that of its closest competitor. Currently, Rumah.com and RumahDijual.com combined have 5.5 million property seekers viewing over 30 million property pages — each month2 — making Indonesia PropertyGuru’s second biggest market in terms of traffic.
Rumah.com has engaged in numerous investments and market engagement activities to solidify its leadership position in Indonesia. Over the past two years, Rumah.com has invested in innovations such as a recent mobile app refresh, a website revamp in Q3 2015, and the incorporation of a mortgage calculator in its website and mobile applications, in order to make home affordability more transparent. As a result, consumer visits to Rumah.com have grown by 22%3 year-on-year, with mobile traffic growth of 53%2.
PropertyGuru’s upside opportunity in Indonesia is tremendous as it has great potential to become a high growth and high demand market driven by its booming population growth, an emerging middle class, rapid urbanization and growth in mobile internet consumption. This growing population will benefit from the widest variety of property choices with PropertyGuru’s acquisition of RumahDijual.com, with close to 500,000 listings across the major islands in Indonesia.
Indonesia has the largest population in the Southeast Asian region with approximately 256 million people and growing by another 2.4 million people (working age population) per annum4. Its GDP is currently growing at 5% per annum (2014 estimates), with 53.7% of its total population considered urbanised.
In the last five years, the country registered an average urbanisation rate of 2.69% annually5, lifting millions from lower income socioeconomic levels to the middle class and/or affluent categories. This has led to a rapid urbanisation where 68% of its population is expected to be living in cities and this figure will increase to 82% by 20456.
A rise in affluence also translates into a surge in mobile internet consumption, and according to Frost & Sullivan, Indonesia will have around 1.7 billion connected devices in 2020, with over 470 million mobile subscribers and over 200 million active internet users7.