How PropertyGuru Approaches Technology Integration

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Like any company that has made acquisitions to fill a product gap, provide new services, or enter new markets, PropertyGuru has had to integrate multiple technology platforms from the companies it acquired over time.

Since 2018, the Singapore-based real estate technology company has been expanding its presence in Southeast Asia by acquiring companies such as BatDongSan, Vietnam’s largest real estate website; the Malaysian and Thai units of the REA group; and MyProperty Data, a Malaysian provider of property data analytics and insights.

Through its acquisition of MyProperty Data, PropertyGuru also offers a cloud-based market intelligence platform for corporate clients, banks, property appraisers and developers in Malaysia.

In 2020, he also launched the PropertyGuru Finance mortgage marketplace in Singapore, which has so far facilitated over S$1 billion worth of mortgages.

Manav Kamboj, chief technology officer of the PropertyGuru group, said the company, which recently made its public debut on the New York Stock Exchange in March 2022, has a history of successful acquisitions with strong integration capabilities.

“You won’t know if an acquisition is successful at the time of acquisition,” he said. “It’s only after the integration is complete that you can see whether it’s a successful acquisition or not.”

One of PropertyGuru’s technology integration strategies, Kamboj said, is to invest in capabilities that can be applied across different platforms and assets it has built or acquired.

As an example, the company has implemented authentication capabilities that allow users using any of PropertyGuru’s platforms to have a consistent authentication experience and login to its platforms. transparently.

Another area is DevOps and continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), which PropertyGuru has been embracing for years now. Kamboj said the company has learned what works over time and applied DevOps best practices across its infrastructure to ensure operational efficiency.

It also helped PropertyGuru not have to deal with tightly coupled systems. Kamboj said the platforms acquired are generally modern, well-designed platforms with well-defined application programming interfaces (APIs) that facilitate communications between systems.

“Therefore, we can derive value from these acquisitions without doing very deep technology integrations,” Kamboj said. “High cohesion and loose coupling this is what we seek to do when we integrate these platforms. »

In software development, high cohesion brings related code together and makes it easier to maintain software modules, while loose coupling refers to the development of independent modules to prevent changes in one module from breaking another.

As for the DevOps culture, which can differ from organization to organization, Kamboj said he’s happy that the acquired companies have, at least in principle, a “very strong alignment not only on DevOps, but also on the broader engineering culture”.

Nevertheless, Manoj noted that the maturity of acquired systems may vary, adding that the company will continue to ensure the right level of integration, not only between systems, but also between teams to foster a shared understanding of DevOps processes and engineering.

In its first earnings announcement after its IPO, PropertyGuru said its total revenue rose 22.7% to S$100.7 million in its 2021 financial year, reflecting growing confidence in the property market. of Southeast Asia.

As of December 31, 2021, PropertyGuru’s platform connects over 38 million property seekers to over 57,000 real estate agents each month across its digital marketplaces of over 3.3 million listings, with organic traffic representing 82% of its total. overall web traffic.

Amid a buoyant market, the company hopes to do more with the proceeds from its IPO, such as further digitizing the mortgage application process and innovating solutions for developers and real estate agents.

Kamboj said PropertyGuru was also looking to create “developer operating systems” that would drive process automation in property development, sales and management, as well as home services such as contractor services. and moving.

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