‘JUST like any business is a living, breathing thing, an entrepreneur has to be able to adapt over time.” These words of Canadian businessman and media personality Robert Herjavec ring loud and true, especially in a continuously changing global business landscape.
The evolution of business has been hastened by the advent of high technology, particularly online technology—pervading every aspect of our lives, changing the way things are done, and practically requiring businesses and consumers alike to adapt in the process. However, in return, online technology offers unparalleled convenience that has made it rather difficult to imagine life without it.
So, as the whole world moves online, entrepreneurs have promptly followed suit, creating a fresh business landscape that exists primarily in cyberspace. One such entrepreneur, who has made a mark in online business, is Jacqueline van den Ende, managing director and founder of Lamudi Philippines, an online real-estate portal.
Van den Ende was the founder of De Kleine Consultant, the first nonprofit, student-run, strategy consultancy with offices across the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Sweden. She relocated in the Philippines in November 2013 to set up Lamudi Philippines, which can be found in www.lamudi.com.ph.
Lamudi Philippines is part of the global Lamudi network, which covers more than 30 countries across Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. The online property finder has been around for just a year and a half, but it already has 90,000 residential and commercial property listings.
Recently, Lamudi Philippines acquired MyProperty.ph in a bid to integrate and strengthen the online real-estate market in the Philippines.
What was the actual objective of creating Lamudi Philippines? What were the reasons that you felt necessitated the creation of a new real-estate portal in the country?
Van den Ende: “The Philippines is one of Asia’s and the emerging world’s bright spots. Economic growth is the strongest in Southeast Asia and second in the Asia-Pacific region, after China. We felt that the Philippine market is ripe for a big player to dominate the online real-estate game, basically due to a number of reasons. Internet penetration is increasing really fast, which, right now, is about 38 percent, and is even expected to cross the 50-percent mark, before the end of 2015.
Also, during the time we came up with Lamudi Philippines, no single player dominated the market, so we felt that the Philippines is one of the few Asian markets with huge potential. Moreover, the Philippine real-estate market is buoyant, dynamic and ready to go digital: Developers are earmarking considerable amounts for online marketing and, based on our research in 2014, 90 percent of licensed brokers see the Internet as the first go-to tool during the house-hunting process.”
Real estate is very personal-selling-driven. The insurance industry once tried to bypass the brokers and the sellers by offering online insurance buying, and it was met with some initial resistance. I want to understand how you intend to address possible sensitivities that might arise due to the presence of an online real-estate portal?
Van den Ende: “In Lamudi what we do as an online real-estate portal is to connect sellers with real-estate buyers. We do not engage in real-estate transactions. So we do not get commissions on any sale. In that sense, there is no bypassing of any seller. What we really do is lead generation for brokers.
We use a subscription model for the business. Brokers basically pay to post their listings. Then what we do as a company is that we invest heavily in online marketing—in Google Ads and pay advertising on Facebook.
The consumer is moving online. Already around 40 percent of Filipinos are online. If the consumer is online, you need to be visible online as a broker. But that’s quite challenging, because even if brokers have their web site—and that is only around 5 percent of all brokers—how do they ensure that their web site is visible on Google? If their web site does not rank on the first two pages of Google, most likely they will never get any visitor.
That is where Lamudi comes in. We help people be visible online by doing the online marketing for them and we help brokers to be found through the Lamudi web site.”
What is in the pipeline for Lamudi Philippines over the next 12 months?
Van den Ende: “Our focus is on growth, particularly listing growth. We want to solidify our position as the most comprehensive database of unique property listings—for rent or for sale—in the entire Philippines. We need to get to a point, where every Filipino trusts that they no longer have to go to any other web site but Lamudi because every single listing is on it. That is one of the prime focuses.”
How do we manage that when some properties are not exclusively listed?
Van den Ende: “That is, indeed, an important characteristic of the Filipino real-estate market. In the Netherlands we have an exclusive market. Every property has a broker.
Here, pretty much any agent or any broker is accredited with every developer, so they can pretty much sell any project in the Philippines. With that realization, we decided to not allow unlicensed agents to advertise on Lamudi because they can only advertise what brokers have to advertise. We, therefore, only work with Professional Regulation Commission-licensed brokers. Since even PRC-licensed brokers can do double-listing, we, thus, work directly and exclusively with developers for preselling projects. This avoids the double-listing problem. Brokers can only list for the secondary markets.”
Lamudi seems to be revolutionizing the way selling real estate is done. But, aside from this, what are Lamudi’s other contributions to the local real-estate industry, particularly in terms of marketing?
Van den Ende: “We believe that Lamudi contributes to the professionalization of the local real-estate industry. A lot of people think that having a web site is good enough. However, there is a major difference between simply being online and being successful online.
We, thus, came up with an education program, called the Lamudi Online Academy, where we teach people every aspect of being successful online. We cover many topics, like online marketing techniques managing Internet-generated leads.
We do a lot of big trainings not only at management levels, but also at levels of sales teams. We work with a lot of big developers, like Robinson’s Homes and Megaworld. This is from five to a couple of hundred people at a time. We’ve been doing this since we started. In fact, we have seminars in our office every two weeks. “
It seems that you have a lot of information and education campaigns for brokers, as well as initiatives at growing and educating the market itself. This is definitely beneficial for the sellers and the buyers. However, how does this redound to the company’s benefit?
Van den Ende: “It’s very important to educate people on being successful online because it also contributes to our objectives as a company.
If brokers know how to do selling online and create better listings, that would also be beneficial to the quality of our site. For example, we generate leads for our clients, and they get from us e-mails and phone calls. The response rate to these e-mails and phone calls is often dramatically low. Only 30 percent of brokers respond to our clients, who are inquiring about their property within a day. But, if they respond a day later, the chance of converting that lead into a sale is 60 times lower. So it works both ways. If they understand how online works, they would respond appropriately and this would be beneficial to the quality of our listing.”
What are the other areas of the local real-estate industry that Lamudi hopes to be able to help address, correct or enhance?
Van den Ende: “Our focus, first and foremost, is on creating a complete overview of all properties online, which will increase transparency. For the people searching for property, Lamudi presents one comprehensive source of data of legit listings.
Legitimacy is very important because there are a lot of portals and many instances of fraud cases when there is insufficient control of who actually is advertising and insufficient control of the actual listings.
So, our objective is to come up with a listing that is trusted and comprehensive. We want to ensure that we have every single listing online. We also collect a lot of data that helps to inform customers. We write a lot of articles to inform the buyers, like what should you pay attention to when getting a housing loan, or what is a property appraisal and why should you do it?
In terms of the professionalizing of brokers, it’s not only about going online. It’s also about digitizing the brokers’ entire administration. I was surprised when I first came to the Philippines to see so many brokers having piles of papers and having their listings on a whiteboard and hardly knowing how to use the computer.
In this regard, we have come up with Lamudi-listing classes where all the brokers come and learn to do uploads. Also, in the future, we hope to create tools to help people digitize their administration.
What do you see are the top trends for the digitalization of the real-estate market in Asia?
Van den Ende: “It is really interesting to look at the region because you see a lot of differences. If you look at, for example, Myanmar and Bangladesh, where we also have Lamudi companies, they basically precede the Internet. Internet penetration is less than 5 percent in Myanmar. The market is not there yet, so we are driving the market.
However, markets like Indonesia or Thailand are three to five years ahead of the Philippines in terms of digitalization and being online. Most of the brokers are already online, and there are already a large number of very successful real-estate portals catering to that market.
The Philippine market is exactly on the pivotal point, where people are shifting from offline to online; that is why we see such a high interest. Everybody understands that he needs to go online. People are now starting to post online, but for a long time to come, and, I think, this is something that will stay for next three to 10 years, it will always be a mix of offline and online.
Brokers will use online channels but referrals, and possibly ads in newspapers and magazines, will still stay for quite a while. Although everybody is exploring online, developers are still generally very conservative in shifting from offline to online. As such, there is still much work to be done.”