ProTech is technology in real estate. Like other industries, the property sector is being forced to adopt technology if it is to survive the disruption brought about by the innovative use of technology. Unlike other industry sectors, however, technology adoption and disruption hasn’t been as expansive.
There remains little incentive to disrupt the status quo. Investors, homebuyers and those just looking to rent or rent out a property still prefer the old ways of doing business.
FutureCIO spoke to ohmyhome co-founder and chief executive officer, Rhonda Wong to talk the startup’s origins and how tech fuels the property business.
What drove you and your sister to set ohmyhome?
Rhonda Wong: I pursued a career in Finance as a derivatives trader in Chicago upon graduation from university. Made some money from that job and started investing in real estate in Singapore. I found it difficult to meet agents that advised me in my best interest and therefore went to take the sales license myself and joined a prominent real estate agency.
I felt there was more the industry could offer to better serve investor profile consumers like ourselves and hence I set up my own real estate agency for High Net Worth clients together with Race.
As a business, our agency did well, but we weren’t able to assist friends and families who approached us with the problems they encountered with their personal housing transactions. And having done real estate transactions in over 7 countries, we realised that the overarching issues and pain points are very similar across the world.
These common issues ultimately are about inefficiencies, so we tapped on our experiences to build Ohmyhome, Singapore’s first one-stop shop property solution to make housing transactions simple, fast and affordable.
We launched Ohmyhome in 2016 with a hybrid model comprising a platform for self-managed transactions (DIY) and fixed-fee agent services. We quickly expanded to provide other transaction-essential services such as mortgage advisory, conveyancing and more.
We are now in two Southeast Asian markets, Singapore and Malaysia and will enter a third market in 2020. Till date, close to 5,300 homes in Singapore and Malaysia have transacted through Ohmyhome, which represents a combined value of over S$1.6 billion.
More than 8,000 buyers and sellers have also engaged with Ohmyhome’s value-added services. Ohmyhome’s mobile application has recorded more than 300,000 downloads and has an average of 150,000 monthly active users on web and app.
What was the biggest challenge you faced?
Rhonda Wong: Raising awareness amongst the community about better ways to transact can sometimes be challenging. Most people were eager to learn about a great solution, but there were still some people who were not aware that they aren’t getting the best service or advice, with some unaware that they were not selling at the best possible price – because they only sell once.
Therefore, we often undertake the task of sharing our knowledge, through our blogs and seminars, to help them avoid making the same mistakes. It was a challenging process but a rewarding one.
It’s been nearly four years since you incorporated ohmyhome. What has changed in those times?
Rhonda Wong: Our business efficiency has increased tremendously. We have a viable and successful model that is sustainable and scalable. Back then, the challenge was creating the model, fine-tuning and validating it in the market.
Now it’s about scaling it up and localising it to different markets. We are planning to enter our third market this year, so we are spending the bulk of our time on research and development in the new market.
If you had to pick the biggest lesson you have learned over the course of the four years, what would that be?
Rhonda Wong: When we started, we had engaged an external developer to develop the first version of our mobile app. It wasn’t a wise decision, not just because they were costly, but they were also inflexible on some of the changes we wanted to make at the speed that we were growing.
We felt restricted because this is ultimately our product, but we had little control over its quality. Relying on an external developer also impeded our growth as we were unable to make timely iterations on features and improvements to the app.
We eventually made the tough call to re-develop the app from scratch with a new team of engineers that we brought on board.
Having an in-house development team meant that we could control the experience, quality, and the process. This desire to ensure the best quality in everything we do has manifested into every part of Ohmyhome such that we are now able to effectively manage every aspect of the transaction and ensure that customers have a great experience.
Even our agents are hired full-time as salaried professionals, unlike the traditional freelancer model practiced by other real estate agencies, so that we can ensure the quality of service.
How important is technology for Ohmyhome?
Rhonda Wong: Technology is integral to Ohmyhome. Without it, Ohmyhome can’t exist in the first place. Ohmyhome uses technology to bridge the gap between homeowners and home seekers, allowing them to communicate seamlessly and enable transactions to happen with more certainty and efficiency.
We set out to provide everyone with not just a free platform to conduct their real estate transactions but also curated services to complete the transactions with agent, documentation, mortgage and legal services.
We are constantly improving on the technological stack that we are using. Better sprints, retrospectives, feedback, QA, data analysis and research have helped us make better decisions. Our Web Team explored modern framework to improve on performance significantly; App Team rebuilt and enhanced features to support better UX.
We utilise technology to improve our users’ and clients’ experience and our efficiency for both online and offline. We analyse user behaviour and improve our user experience. Our unique matching algorithm matches buyers to sellers, landlords to tenants to enable a fast and accurate match.
Also, we produce in-house home research reports to enable our customers to access transparent information to make informed decisions with regards to their properties and their homes.
The combination of our operations team and machines handle approximately 80% of the work a regular agent usually does such as sourcing for new leads, scheduling, advertising etc. We achieve the fastest speed of sale that’s three times faster than the industry average.
How would you describe PropTech (a) from a technology perspective; (b) from a business perspective?
Rhonda Wong: From a technology perspective:
We’ve seen a lot of exciting innovation in the construction space, 3D rendering, facilities management space. In the transaction space, outside of Ohmyhome, many transactions are still done in the traditional method.
However, we observed that our new way of buying, selling and renting is becoming more mainstream. Our number of transactions has grown more than tenfold over the last three years as we continue to build new technologies to accelerate home transactions.
Part of it is the growing number of buyers and sellers who want to make informed choices on who they would like to entrust their transactions with. It is crucial in this environment to continue to build trust and provide value to our users to make informed choices.
With consumers becoming more informed and property-literate, we will continue to analyse data combined with machine learning to provide property market insights to home buyers and sellers, as well as institutional property investors.
The future of PropTech transactions will also fully-utilise AI to provide buyers and sellers with housing market intelligence and tap on large data sets to analyse and make predictions.
From a business perspective, the industry is still nascent, but the growth is healthy. According to a Regus article, globally, there are now more than 6,000 PropTech businesses and, last year, more than US$4.6 billion were invested in their growth.
PropTech enables a streamline use of manpower through the efficiency it creates. It allows hyperlocalization, which means a better experience for users, speedier transactions with fewer mistakes that are often costly. We believe that more businesses will be encouraged to include PropTech in their traditional ways of doing business.
What pre-occupies you as founders of ohmyhome?
Rhonda Wong: A lot of people around the world don’t have access to a good property transaction platform with quality services to help them sell and buy a home which can create a whole host of issues for them.
For example, not being able to sell their house promptly can lead to cash flow problems; miscalculation of the net sale proceeds may affect the seller’s ability to afford the purchase of a new home.
Other times the sale drags on for months and causes undue stress on the family. If we can help alleviate some of these problems, I think we would have made a difference as a company.
What is your advice to women considering a career in entrepreneurship?
Rhonda Wong: Whether you’re a man or a woman, the challenges of starting your own business are largely the same. Have a strong vision of what you want to accomplish so that every effort and sacrifice you make will be meaningful.
