UnicoMarketing: Lamudi wants to be a property website you can trust

If you’re looking to buy a house and don’t know any sellers or brokers, where do you go first? You can try sift through the general classifieds – page by page – for prospects, go door-to-door in areas you’d like to live in, and visit project launches or showrooms of real estate developers. Or you can look the most convenient way: online.

But while researching online saves you time (you don’t have to commute or drive around), it can be tedious. How do you scour a universe of content to find the best deal? And in the Philippines, where online scams are common, how can you be sure your transaction is safe?

That’s where real estate listing websites like Lamudi Philippines come in. Rather than visiting 10 or 20 different broker sites, these listing sites allow homebuyers to find every single property for sale or rent in the country in one place. The listings offer you vital information on the properties such as type (house and lot, condominium, apartment), price, as well as photos so you’d have an idea of what the properties look like.

Unlike many listing sites however, for Lamudi, “legitimacy” is top priority. It’s the core of their operations. “Lamudi is the only site that strictly only works with Philippine Regulatory Commission-licensed brokers. Consumers can be sure that they can trust our brokers,” founder Jacqueline van den Ende tells Tech in Asia.

Lamudi Philippines founder Jacqueline van den Ende

How Lamudi started in the Philippines

Van den Ende herself knows the value of listing sites like Lamudi for home hunters. In the Netherlands, where she was based before moving to the Philippines to set up the company, she had experienced first hand how incredibly convenient it was to browse any kind of property across the country from behind her computer screen.

“I spent day and night browsing Funda, the online real estate platform of the Netherlands. Photos, floor plans, descriptions were all in one place and saved me a lot of time going to trips because, from the internet, I could already make a good assessment whether I like the property or not,” she recalls.

So when she got the invitation from German startup incubator Rocket Internet to found Lamudi in the Philippines in 2013, she didn’t think twice. She says she knew having such a platform would be indispensable and one of the biggest innovations possible for any country.

Besides, she missed being an entrepreneur. She once co-founded a strategy consulting firm, then took a break from being a businesswoman. She worked for three years at HAL Investments, one of the largest privately owned equity funds in the Netherlands.

She was so determined to found or join a startup again in 2013 that she changed the login password of her laptop to “Startup2013” to remind herself of her dream every day. She got that opportunity when the offer from Rocket Internet came. Never mind that she had to quit her job and move to a totally different country. “I figured that if anything, it would be a good adventure and learning experience.”

“If you don’t have a go, you will never know. It is the most elementary truth I know and has all throughout my life inspired me to take chances and jump into the unknown,” she says.

See: Rocket Internet’s property search site Lamudi gets $7 million to fuel Asian expansion

Navigating through the challenges

Setting up the business turned out to be more challenging than Van den Ende had anticipated. She says the biggest hurdle was finding the right people. “We spent weeks searching Linkedin and talking to people, convincing them to join our three-man startup team.”

To top it all off, their HR manager quit after a few weeks for unknown reasons. They fortunately sorted this out over time, and now Lamudi has a stable team of around 40 individuals in the Philippines.

In terms of the market, she says it’s taking her a while to adjust to an entirely new culture. One thing she finds difficult to cope with is the fact that Filipinos do not always dare to be frank or direct. “Customers would rather come up with any kind of unlikely excuse, change phone numbers, or simply disappear from the face of the earth than to tell you outright that they are not interested in your product. In the Netherlands, we are used to being very direct.”

Brokers, on the other hand, are reluctant to post their listings side by side with other brokers.

How then does Lamudi lure buyers and brokers alike to its site? Van den Ende offers this simple answer: through quality service and education. The way they deliver these however is not at all simple.

Aside from making sure that all brokers are certified by government, they have to be certain that each listing is complete, and photos are of high quality.

Brokers also need to be educated on how Lamudi works. Van den Ende likens the site to a shopping mall, where say 10 or more computer stores are selling side by side. “Why are they competing in a mall? Because the customer is there. The key question is how do you stand out in the crowd and get more customers than your competition?”

She says everything boils down to the quality of listings. That’s why they go to any extent to help the brokers. Every two weeks, Lamudi gives seminars on online marketing techniques brokers can apply. They also give bi-monthly classes where they teach them to upload and manage their listings so they can maximize their accounts. Sometimes, Lamudi staff upload the listings themselves, recognizing that brokers’ key constraint is more often time than lack of inquiries. Van den Ende recalls how just recently she spent three hours to upload listings for a totally non-tech savvy broker. “You literally have to take brokers by the hand.”

She adds, “Because brokers are still unfamiliar with online marketing and are super busy, I think these are key added services that will help us to win the market, not only in terms of visitors but also in terms of broker engagement.”

It is no doubt a highly competitive market. Not counting established players like iProperty or PropertyGuru, Lamudi is going head to head with real estate listing sites such as Zipmatch, True Property, and Property24. “Competition is tight already and tightening further still. The number of online real estate websites has grown explosively during the past year,” Van den Ende notes.

Globally, the Lamudi group has about 700,000 listings, of which over half are in Southeast Asia. The Philippines ranks among its top three markets worldwide, with around 85,000 unique listings and over 1,000 brokers signed up. Brokers pay a monthly subscription fee for placing their listings on Lamudi’s sites.

See: 4 property marketplaces to watch out for in the Philippines

Van den Ende with the Lamudi Philippines team

Why the Philippines?

Van den Ende largely credits the Rocket Internet team with the success of Lamudi in the Philippines. After all, it is also the force behind other successful online trading sites like Carmudi, Lazada and Zalora.

Yet she says the company wouldn’t have grown at the rate it did if not for the strong demand from the very market they cater to. The Philippine real estate market is in a boom – the economy is growing, there’s a huge housing backlog, interest rates are near record lows, and waves of expats looking for a place to stay are coming in.

Van den Ende adds, “the tech startup scene is just emerging.”

With Internet penetration on the rise, more and more people are going online for their needs. She expects developments in mature markets in the US and Europe to also happen here – 90 to 100 percent of real estate searching has shifted online and pretty much all real estate searches are conducted through online real estate platforms like Zillow in the US and Rightmove in the UK. “With growing internet penetration, now 36 percent in the Philippines versus 81 percent in the US, we will see the same trend in the Philippines.”

She adds, “The shift to online will be a driver of further professionalization of the market. The tech savvy and more professional brokers will thrive most from the shift to online and will be best equipped to capture a good share of the rapidly increasing number of customers browsing for property online.

“I am 100 percent sure that within the next three to five years all Filipinos will start their house search online.”

What’s next for Lamudi?

Van den Ende says it’s evident that real estate listing sites have trumped general classifieds because of the “added value” they offer in terms of extensive search filters, map search, price comparison and legitimacy.

She assures Filipinos they can expect more innovations from Lamudi in the future. “There is a wealth of opportunities ahead as demonstrated by websites like Zillow, which have extensive price comparison features.”

For now, Lamudi is focusing on introducing more features on its site. Recently, it unveiled the live chat option so brokers and home seekers can ask their questions and get answers real time. It also launched its mobile apps for Android and iOS, allowing users to look for properties using their smartphones.