Rise of real estate revives PropertyGuru listing
Regional real estate portal PropertyGuru lines up as a candidate for the 2017 initial public offering pipeline.
Investors' seemingly endless romance with both tech and property stocks will get yet another opportunity to blossom, with regional real estate portal PropertyGuru lining up as a candidate for the 2017 initial public offering pipeline.
It's not the first run at the boards for PropertyGuru, which postponed preparations for a float in late 2014 as choppy equity markets put a halt to tech listings in particular
A lot has happened since then. Midway through last year a private equity consortium including Paul Bassat's Square Peg Capital injected $S175 million into the south-east Asian platform which is based in Singapore.
That consortium included global private equity giant TPG, Indonesia's largest media group Emtek, and Square Peg, the Australian private equity group focused on tech and online companies.
Macquarie Capital advised on that deal and would be well-placed to oversee next year's IPO.
Square Peg was co-founded by Wesfarmers director Paul Bassat, who also co-founded jobs site, Seek.
Their investment in PropertyGuru, took out the stake held by German real estate portal Scout24, while adding a significant amount of fresh capital to develop the business.
Scout24 was of course then home for former REA chief executive Greg Ellis.
And it's the example of REA, now a $7 billion stock, that will be front of mind for the owners and potential investors into any PropertyGuru float.
Disruption has hit the real estate market as hard as any other. As property buyers and sellers look to bypass the fees made by real-world intermediaries, it is online platforms that are collecting their trade.
And as the Australian market gets saturated, investment into disruption has to go offshore. There is a big growth market for PropertyGuru, with 500 million people in its southeast Asian catchment.
The platform is eager to expand. Its latest move is to invest in Vietnam's Batdongsan, thereby gaining a foothold in one of the fastest growing countries in the region.