PropertyGuru Group has gathered its business-facing products under a single brand, PropertyGuru For Business, launched in Bangkok as the Southeast Asian property company marked fifteen years of operating. The brand collects tools the group has built or bought — the market intelligence platform DataSense, the developer sales platform FastKey, the valuation service ValueNet, plus event and marketing services — and sells them to developers, agencies, banks, valuers and planners rather than to home seekers.

The company's chief executive and managing director, Hari V. Krishnan, says the launch is timely and aimed at giving enterprise clients the data and tools to navigate uncertain economic conditions. Shyn Yee Ho-Strangas, who runs its data and software business, says the group will work with property stakeholders to improve systems in the markets where it operates. DataSense, previously called Vantage+, is available in Malaysia and the company says it will bring it to Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia.

Selling data to the industry that makes the data

Property portals sit on a large amount of information about prices, listings and demand, and selling insights drawn from it is a familiar second act. The trade-off is that the same data is only valuable while it is trusted and reasonably complete, and property markets in the region are patchy: ownership rules, transaction records and reporting differ from country to country, which is close to what the company itself says about legacy systems.

Putting the products under one brand is a marketing decision as much as a product one, and it lets the group sell a suite where it used to sell pieces. Whether developers and banks actually pay for the insights, and whether a product proven in Malaysia travels to markets with different property rules, is the part the launch does not show. A brand is a promise about a range of tools; the numbers that would test it — revenue from enterprise clients, and how much of it renews — are not in the announcement.