iProperty Refutes Rival PropertyGuru's #1 Malaysian Portal Claim

Malaysian property portal iProperty has today released a statement claiming to be the country's top property website. In what appears to be a direct reaction to a press release sent to journalists by arch-rival PropertyGuru on Monday which made similar claims, the Newscorp-backed portal claims that "despite the impact of COVID-19, property seekers in Malaysia continue to actively search for their dream home, delivering more potential leads to customers of iProperty.com.my."

Whereas PropertyGuru's market-leadership claims on Monday were based on traffic stats from Alexa, Comscore and Google Analytics and omitted any reference to Similarweb's traffic stats, today's rejoinder from iProperty is based on traffic stats from Similarweb and search volumes from Google Trends and does not mention any other measurement tool.

Although there are caveats around the accuracy of Similarweb's traffic stats, as one of the only freely available public sources of traffic statistics the tool is used by many property portals and marketplace sites to gauge their standing among the competition. Online Marketplaces found that iProperty appears to be ahead in terms of traffic measured on the tool, having reportedly recorded 3,100,000 visits compared to 2,450,000 for PropertyGuru, but that its engagement metrics are below those of PropertyGuru.

As for iProperty's claim that it comes out on top for branded queries in Google's search results, we found that to be correct for the last 12 months, although it is a very close race.

We have embedded the Google Trends data we used to test the claim in this article which will update automatically over time.

iProperty's Malaysia GM Shylendra Nathan doubled down on his company's claim, saying that management are:

"delighted that despite the impact of COVID-19, iProperty.com.my has continued as Malaysia’s No.1 property site, with 35% growth According to SimilarWeb in property seeking audience. This provides our customers with access to the largest group of online property seekers in Malaysia, as indicated by SimilarWeb. This also means iProperty.com.my is retaining market leadership by owning 56% market share in terms of property seeking audience as compared to our nearest competitor.”

The battle between these two well-heeled property portals is set to continue in much the same vein as it has done for years with the REA Group-controlled iProperty vying for Malaysian user attention with KKR and TPG backed PropertyGuru in what might be the closest thing in the world to a state of neck and neck portal dominance. Both have taken steps into the world of auxiliary financial services and both were at pains in their press releases to point out that they having acquired local property data companies to complement their offerings.