VC-funded 99.co to put renters first in property search
- S$seven hundred,000 raised from 500 Startups, East Ventures, Golden Gate Ventures and Fenox Venture Capital
- Immediate plans focused on growing group and establishing marketplace presence in Singapore
A SINGAPORE-primarily based startup is hoping its internet site will deliver a clean new method to the property search market – by setting the renters first.
Founded through era startup veterans Darius Cheung, Ruiwen Chua, Conor McLaughlin and Anuj Bheda, ninety nine.co made its marketplace debut the day prior to this (May 6) with a beta model of the website now open to property owners, marketers and apartment belongings seekers in Singapore.
The equal crew also runs every other website known as Homie.co, focused at people seeking out rooms and roommates, and proposing properties indexed immediately by the landlord or the master tenant who is also living there.
In evaluation, ninety nine.co is meant for humans renting whole flats, normally with requirements which might be more complex and listings published specifically via professional agents.
The project has received S$seven-hundred,000 (US$561,2 hundred) in seed funding from 500 Startups, East Ventures, Golden Gate Ventures and Fenox Venture Capital via the issuance of convertible notes. The terms of the convertible notes had been not disclosed.
In an e-mail interview with Digital News Asia (DNA) Cheung, who's also the chief executive officer, says that the seed investment money can be channelled in the direction of team boom and advertising.
Cheung is fine known as the founding father of tenCube, a cellular security enterprise that changed into acquired through security solutions supplier McAfee in 2010, and he says that the concept to expand 99.co stemmed from non-public frustrations.
“The idea occurred, like most accurate ideas - whilst one of the founders turned into seeking out a region to rent and the rental search enjoy became simply terrible,” he adds.
Cheung says that he has been renting in Singapore over the last 20 years, and has encountered a large number of bad stories -- from sifting through old listings with awful snap shots, duplicate or faux listings, or even calling or texting marketers who can be unresponsive.
“Sometimes I would block out an afternoon to peer more than one devices at the equal apartment - only to discover that they may be the same unit proven through specific sellers.
“And often I were given bait-and-switched through retailers who would inform me inside the last minute that the apartment has been rented out, and knowingly losing my time via bringing me to many locations I’m truly am not interested in.
“Meanwhile, precise and sincere agents have a difficult time creating a residing because they decline to play such tricks,” he says.
A ‘radical’ method to renting
According the Cheung, ninety nine.co currently offers 2,000 “excessive pleasant” listings of flats and at the same time as in beta section, could be unfastened to use for property proprietors and marketers.
He adds that the website’s name stems from the wide variety ‘9’ (九) which symbolises ‘durability’ in Chinese, and with a mission to help clients find the nice domestic, ninety nine.co “wishes everybody to live long and prosper.” Users can also get admission to the web site the usage of 九九.Co as the URL.
“Besides, it’s a definitely cool domain name,” he quips.
Cheung believes that what is going to make the property website a achievement is its stated challenge of placing the renters, or clients, first.
“This sounds apparent but if you simply take a look at all of the conventional assets web sites, you'll find that they are surely designed for retailers in place of clients, and it’s a fantastically radical idea,” he claims.
To reap that, 99.co is anchoring its person enjoy on key functions together with a simple, fashionable map-primarily based search and presentation of properties, listings vetted for excellent and accuracy similarly to information along with time calculations for public shipping and one-click scheduling of viewings on behalf of renters.
Cheung says that other than using “slicing area software program era” and leveraging top notch facts and services to be had which includes Google Maps, the maximum exciting factor of the website’s offering could be how the crew plans to make sure that listings are correct, high high-quality and non-duplicated.
“We have developed an algorithm and software program which can come across with fantastically high accuracy whether the unit is actual or correct while someone submits a list,” he claims.
For example, if someone submits an apartment listing that has five bedrooms but is only 500 sq.feet in size, the machine might flag it automatically because it is too some distance off the everyday correlation among wide variety of rooms and size of the condo.
Cheung supplied an “outrageous example of a HDB flat that is 108,000 squarefeet" but additionally notes that during truth, most of the exaggeration that agents do are a lot extra subtle – they regularly make it only a little large than it actually is, just to make a renter name them as opposed to a competitor list the same unit. And consumers frequently haven't any idea this occurs.
“This isn't a foolproof manner of direction -- we can’t tell for positive that such an condo does now not exist, so we insert a human-pushed vetting process. Our in-house Rent Geek could pass and check on this to see whether that is in reality proper or now not -- now and again by way of contacting the lister to get extra records, and probably even visiting the apartment in character,” he says.
In addition, pix are particularly difficult to hit upon and filter out via software, and the guide vetting method may even consist of checking photograph to make sure that they're excessive great and appropriately constitute the apartment.
Navigating the condominium marketplace and beyond
“Currently we agree with the model might be that we would take a small flat fee from the agent or landlord for a a hit transaction - that way we're always incentivised to make the search enjoy better.
“Because the most effective way we might achieve success is to continue to make certain we deliver the satisfactory seek results to the customers, instead of the conventional model of promoting ad-area, which could lead us to reflect onconsideration on a way to promote greater commercials,” he says.
Cheung says that plans for the website within the next three hundred and sixty five days are targeted on a roadmap of “generation-driven revolutionary features” to make the condominium revel in even more convenient.
He provides that these functions could contain taking pictures and imparting contextual facts on-line to create transparency, simulating a high constancy viewing enjoy of an condo online, and optimising the matching of sources (to be had residences/ sellers) to the needs of renters in scheduling and in real time.
There aren't any plans to expand ninety nine.co to different markets but, however Cheung says the group is “quite sure” that the technology and version they may be developing in Singapore has strong applicability to different urban cities in Asia.
In the period in-between, the most important task dealing with the 99.co group is the search for talent.
“Finding a crew this is bold and loopy sufficient to take on this venture, is a totally hard trouble to remedy,” says Cheung.
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