Shyn Yee Ho-Strangas, Managing Director, Data and Software Solutions (DSS), PropertyGuru Group
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to dominate the conversation, we get curious about how tech companies of all sizes implement the technology in their products and services. This time, e27 speaks to property tech giant PropertyGuru Group about the problems that they are solving with AI.
In an email interview, Shyn Yee Ho-Strangas, Managing Director, Data and Software Solutions (DSS), PropertyGuru Group, names the impact of climate change as the pressing challenge that the company aims to focus on.
According to her, the real estate industry’s substantial contribution to greenhouse gas emissions urges property developers and homeowners to look for more sustainable ways to do things.
“At PropertyGuru Group, we are committed to using data and insights to bring transparency and decision-making across the real estate ecosystem. We have made significant investments in data science to develop products and solutions to support our customers, consumers, and partners,” explains Ho-Strangas.
“For instance, one key problem that we’re focusing on is how we can address and manage climate risk in real estate in Southeast Asia. The escalating consequences of climate change, including more intense storms, flash floods, wildfires, extreme heat, and other hazards, are significantly impacting the cities we live in. Using a large set of data parameters, we have developed a risk score that assesses the relative risk of homes. Equipped with this risk score, homeowners, buyers, insurers, and banks are able to make better decisions on the financing and safeguarding of their assets.”
To find out more about how PropertyGuru is solving this problem, check out the edited excerpt of our interview below.
Take us through your AI-based solution to solving this sustainability problem.
Our market intelligence platform – DataSense – is a cloud-based software that allows users to access real estate data and actionable insights mined from vast amounts of proprietary and third-party data. We have invested heavily in cleaning and restructuring data and applying data science capabilities in developing useful trends, indices, and models to facilitate better decision-making.
Today, the availability of clean, useful real estate data is very limited, and ownership of data is highly fragmented. Our mission is to make high-quality real estate data and insights more accessible to improve the quality of decision-making. Our platform allows users to answer many questions and address multiple use cases – be it land selection and project pricing for developers, mortgage portfolio re-evaluation for banks, rental yield benchmarking for asset owners or competitive analysis for commercial assets such as malls.
The real estate lifecycle is a complex one and involves various factors and conditions that developers, for instance, need to consider. Specific to sustainability, one major hurdle that developers often face is budgetary pressures to justify costs associated with ESG initiatives, particularly if a sizeable upfront capital outlay is needed. The data and insights we provide allow developers to size their risks alongside customer demand more confidently. One way to address the budgetary pressures is for developers to bundle sustainable features with attributes preferred by consumers.
By aligning these attributes with emerging trends in consumer demand, developers can boost the perceived value and marketability of green initiatives. This not only tackles the challenge of cost justification but also encourages broader adoption of sustainable practices among property seekers.
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In real estate, AI can be a game changer for various aspects beyond sustainability. With PropertyGuru’s integration of AI, we can analyse vast amounts of demographic information, encompassing age distribution, income levels, and lifestyle preferences within specific regions. This comprehensive understanding of the local population empowers city planners and policymakers to make informed decisions, for example, about the demand for senior living facilities and services.
Is there any specific challenges in developing and promoting this technology?
Our use of AI involves the analysis of extensive amounts of data. While this data is crucial for enhancing user experiences and providing valuable insights to our customers, we are also very mindful of data privacy.
Part of digitalising the real estate industry means increasing reliance on data while very carefully watching out and protecting ourselves from nefarious actors looking to obtain personal or sensitive information.
A myriad of sensitive personal information can be found in real estate transactions – from financial data, government-issued identification numbers, insurance information, and passwords – we have to be particularly careful with how we manage and secure our data. To top it up, cloud-based solutions have become increasingly popular for convenience and accessibility, but this also makes data a few clicks away from bad actors if not protected adequately.
At PropertyGuru, data security is driven by design. We are committed to achieving and maintaining the trust of our customers, and integral to this mission is providing a robust security and privacy program that carefully considers data protection matters across our suite of products, solutions, and services. With more than hundreds of enterprise customers using our solutions across Southeast Asia, we follow the best industry best practices on data security and comply with information security guidelines from PDPA in Singapore, along with other local regulations where we operate, and are GDPR ready.
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Our server is hosted on a world-class platform with limited ports, and access is available only to very limited and controlled users. Beyond hardware measures, there is also a robust Threat Management and Incident response plan to respond quickly and pre-emptively to security incidents should they happen.
What are other areas of AI that you would like to explore? As AI becomes increasingly popular, do you find that the trend helps your work in any way? Is there any opportunity that you are seizing?
PropertyGuru has been experimenting with Generative AI for over a year as a way to both make our internal operations more efficient and bring greater value to our agent partners. This is part of our commitment to stay at the forefront of tech advancements and deliver the best possible solutions to our customers.
We’re using Generative AI and machine learning to bolster our market-leading products and make our operations more efficient. For instance, in June, we launched GuruPicks, a personalised feed of property listings based on machine learning algorithms. GuruPicks offers opportunities to match a person’s budget, property type, and location to show personalised and recent listings.
For property agents in Singapore, we recently introduced Lead Management to help subscribers manage their leads by using a single inbox for all email, phone, SMS, and WhatsApp contacts while also adding a heat index and insights on lead preferences.
This is in addition to us launching a revamp of our New Homes discovery page in Singapore and Malaysia, increasing the coverage of new properties and better organising the customer experience to make it easier to find ones under development.
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Generative AI is increasingly helping us operate more efficiently and effectively in product development and code quality. We have been experimenting with the auto-creation of listing descriptions that benefit agent efficiency, as well as AI image moderation, to continue to improve listing quality.
PropertyGuru has a 15-year legacy of innovation that has powered us to become Southeast Asia’s prop-tech leader – we continue to deepen investments in AI and machine learning for our data and software solutions, as well as fintech to help property seekers find, finance, and own homes. We continue to develop and deploy products and technology for responsible use by our growing customer base.
What is your major focus this year on your tech solutions?
For our Data Software & Solutions business, we will continue to work closely with property developers, bankers and all enterprise customers to offer them customised data and insights to improve decision-making and create more business efficiency for them. We will continue our investments in data science to develop products and solutions to support our customers, consumers, and partners.
We recently released a progressive ESG framework as part of a report titled The Real Estate World in Transition that gives valuable insights into building ‘Climate-Smart’ real estate. The actionable strategies for property developers and investors embrace sustainability without compromising financial viability. This report is part of broader market activities to educate developers and planners with data-driven insights to drive responsible property development in our region.
Our flagship insights dashboard DataSense is also being increasingly used by new governmental agencies in Singapore and Malaysia, REITs and industry bodies such as the Real Estate and Housing Developers Association.
Both the fintech as well as the data and software solutions arm are longer-term strategic opportunities for PropertyGuru Group as we continue to invest and build out the business. With the fundamental opportunities in our core markets, we are committed to future growth and profitability anchored around our vision to power communities to live, work and thrive in tomorrow’s cities.
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Image Credit: PropertyGuru
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