Singapore property portals: who owns them and what agents pay

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Kooky

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A home for sale or rent in Singapore is usually seen first on a private property portal, in an advertisement a property agent has paid to place. The portals are businesses: they have owners, price lists and their own rules about what a listing may contain. They are not the regulator, and they are not the official record of prices. A reader who knows who owns a portal, what the agent paid to appear on it and which rules the advertisement must meet reads a search page differently.

This guide describes the position as read in October 2026. It rests on documents the companies and the regulator have published: the release EQT issued when it completed its purchase of PropertyGuru, PropertyGuru's own package page for Singapore agents, a valuation page published by SRX, an article 99 Group published on its portal, two documents of the Council for Estate Agencies (CEA), and two trade press reports on 99 Group's acquisitions. Every company figure below is that company's claim, attributed and dated. The guide does not rank the portals and does not say which one an agent or a consumer should use. Where a page could not be read, the gap is named in the last section.

EQT release, "EQT completes acquisition of PropertyGuru", dated 13 December 2024, read in October 2026.

PropertyGuru since its 2024 take-private

PropertyGuru was a listed company until the end of 2024. In a release dated 13 December 2024, EQT said that EQT Private Capital Asia had completed the acquisition of PropertyGuru Group, and that the buyer was BPEA Private Equity Fund VIII. The price given in the release was US$6.70 per share in cash, which the release said valued the company at an equity value of approximately US$1.1 billion.

The same release sets out what happened to the listing. PropertyGuru's shares stopped trading before the market opened on 13 December 2024 and the company was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. Holders of unexercised warrants were told that each warrant, if exercised through 12 January 2025, was exchangeable for US$0.7526. The release names TPG and KKR as the investors that had backed the company before the sale.

The figures in the December 2024 release date from the moment the company left the exchange, and this guide treats them as dated claims, not as a current count.

Those claims are as follows. The release describes PropertyGuru as founded in 2007 and headquartered in Singapore, operating in four markets: Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. It says the group's platforms connect more than 31 million property seekers a month with more than 50,000 agents, and carry more than 2.1 million listings. The footnotes matter as much as the numbers. According to the release, the seeker and listing figures are based on data for January to June 2024, drawn from SimilarWeb, Google Analytics and the company's own listing data, and the agent figure is based on April to June 2024. The release gives no separate figure for Singapore, so none is given here.

The release also lists the group's other lines of business by name: PropertyGuru Finance, a home services brand called Sendhelper, PropertyGuru for Business, and two data products, DataSense and ValueNet. Its chief executive at the time, Hari V. Krishnan, is quoted in the release as saying: "we welcome EQT to PropertyGuru."

How 99 Group gathered three brands

The second large portal company in Singapore, 99 Group, is privately held and was built partly by acquisition. Two trade press reports give the outline.

The first step was reported by KrASIA on 8 October 2019. According to that report, the company behind the 99 portal acquired the consumer brands of the Australian group REA in Singapore and Indonesia: the Singapore portal of iProperty, which the report says was founded in 2007, and the Indonesian portal Rumah123. The report describes the arrangement as a joint venture valued at more than US$100 million to be led by the Singapore company's own management. It says REA Group would invest US$8 million in capital. No ownership percentages are carried from the report into the research for this guide.

KrASIA adds some history that explains why REA held these brands. REA Group had acquired iProperty Group in 2015 for US$531 million, the report says. It also records that the Singapore company had closed a Series B funding round of US$15.2 million in August 2019, led by MindWorks Ventures and Allianz X, and names East Ventures and Sequoia Capital India among its backers. On audience, the only figure taken from the report is the company's own claim, made in 2019, that its traffic had grown 32 times in two years.

The second step was reported by the trade publication Online Marketplaces on 9 November 2020. It said 99 Group had announced it was acquiring Singapore Real Estate Exchange, known as SRX, for an undisclosed price, with completion expected in the second quarter of 2021. The report describes SRX as launched in Singapore in 2009. It describes 99 Group as backed by REA Group and News Corp. The group's chief executive, Darius Cheung, is quoted there: "SRX's best-in-class data capabilities are a natural fit for our platform."

One point on SRX's ownership is not clean. The Online Marketplaces report notes that Singapore Press Holdings bought a 60 per cent stake in SRX's parent company in 2014, without saying whether that stake was what 99 Group bought. And the SRX valuation page read for this guide in October 2026 still describes SRX Valuations as a division of StreetSine Technology Group, which it calls a subsidiary of Singapore Press Holdings. The two descriptions do not match, and the page read carries no date. Both are given here as their sources give them.

What PropertyGuru's package grid charges agents

PropertyGuru publishes its Singapore price list for agents. The package page, re-read for this guide on 10 October 2026, sets out four tiers, Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum, with a "Plus" version of the last three, which the page says includes more ad credits and concurrent listings. One caution applies to everything in this section. The page's grid names its seven packages in one row and gives the figures in the rows below, seven to a row, without repeating the names. The table here pairs each figure with a package by its position in that row. All prices on the page are stated as including 9 per cent goods and services tax. Each package is defined by three things: a price, a number of "ad credits", and a number of concurrent listings, meaning how many advertisements the agent may have live at once.

The page also shows a monthly figure for each package: S$180 for Bronze, S$561 for Silver, S$728 for Silver Plus, S$1,200 for Gold, S$1,736 for Gold Plus, S$2,899 for Platinum and S$3,535 for Platinum Plus. Twelve times the monthly figure comes to within a few dollars of the annual one in every case: 12 times S$180 is S$2,160 against S$2,161 for Bronze, and 12 times S$2,899 is S$34,788 against S$34,792 for Platinum. The monthly figure reads as the annual price spread over the year.

Two things on the grid are worth setting side by side. The packages do not scale evenly. From Bronze to Platinum Plus the annual price rises from S$2,161 to S$42,425, about 19.6 times. Over the same span the ad credits rise 52 times, from 1,000 to 52,000, while the concurrent listings rise 30 times, from 5 to 150. The larger packages buy proportionally more credits than they buy listing slots.

The page also prices credits bought on top of a package. The top-up price it shows falls with the tier: S$2.07 per credit at Bronze, S$1.85 at Silver, S$1.74 at Silver Plus, S$1.25 at Gold, S$1.20 at Gold Plus, S$1.04 at Platinum and S$0.98 at Platinum Plus. The page says savings on credit purchases depend on the quantity bought and do not apply during promotions. What the page as read does not say is how many credits a single action costs, such as posting a listing or keeping it live, or whether the credit allowance is for a month or a year. Without that, the grid shows what an agent pays PropertyGuru but not how far the credits go.

A worked example from the grid

The following is a worked example, not a figure PropertyGuru publishes. It assumes that the credit allowance shown for each package covers the whole year billed, which the page as read does not state, and it simply divides the annual price by the credits.

On that assumption, the result sits close to the top-up prices the page gives for the smaller tiers, S$2.07 at Bronze and S$1.85 at Silver, which is some support for reading the allowance as annual. It remains an assumption.

The same division can be done on listing slots, and it gives a different picture. Bronze at S$2,161 for 5 concurrent listings works out at about S$432 per slot for the year. Silver at S$6,731 for 25 slots is about S$269. Gold at S$14,399 for 60 slots is about S$240. Platinum at S$34,792 for 100 slots is about S$348. On this measure the price per slot does not fall steadily: it is lowest at Gold and rises again at Platinum, where the package adds far more credits and features than slots. An agent's cost of appearing on the portal therefore depends on which of the two the agent actually uses up, the slots or the credits, and that turns on the case.

Paying for position in the search results

A package buys the right to list. Position in the results is sold separately, through features the package page names and describes in one line each. This is the part of the business model a consumer sees without knowing it: the order of a results page is partly paid for.

According to the page, a "Boost" ranks a listing above regular listings. A "Turbo" ranks it above boosted listings. "Turbo Pro", which the page ties to the Gold and Platinum tiers, is described as guaranteeing a place among the first ten search results. The Platinum tier is described as including "Always on Boost". "Promoted Listings" are offered from Silver upwards.

The tier also decides how much of the agent a listing shows. The page describes four kinds of listing card, one for each tier: Basic at Bronze, Enhanced at Silver, Premium at Gold and Exclusive at Platinum, each with its own list of what the card displays.

The remaining items on the grid are working tools for the agent, described here as the page describes them. Lead storage runs for one year at Bronze and Silver and two years at Gold and Platinum. A tool called MarketWatch offers alerts from Silver and price-change tracking from Gold. Three further tools are listed at every tier: Listing Optimiser, which the company's agent help page says is now live in its AgentNet app, Unit and Project Insights, and Prospector. For none of these does the page say where the underlying data comes from.

The verified badge and what the pages leave unsaid

PropertyGuru's package page lists "Verified Listings" as available at every tier. It says a verified listing receives a "Verified" badge, a higher search ranking and a place in dedicated search results limited to verified listings. The agent help page describes the purpose in the company's words: "Build buyer confidence with verified property listings."

Neither page, as read in October 2026, explains how a listing comes to be verified: what is checked, against which record, by whom, or how often. The company's advertisement and content guidelines for Singapore, where rules on duplicates and removals would be expected, could not be read for this guide. So the badge is described here only as far as the published pages go. It is the company's own label, and the pages read do not set out its test.

What CEA asks of every advertisement

The portals' rules sit on top of the regulator's. CEA is the regulator of property agents, and the disciplinary case described below shows its advertising rules applied to listings on a portal. A tip of the month CEA published for agents in April 2019, stated as accurate at 30 April 2019, sets them out in plain terms and cites two documents: the Practice Guidelines on Ethical Advertising and the Code of Ethics and Professional Client Care.

Consent comes first. According to the tip, an agent must identify the rightful owners and obtain consent from all of them before advertising a property for sale or rent. Consent may be given in writing, by SMS or through any verifiable channel, and before the owners consent the agent must tell them in writing the agent's name and registration number.

The tip then deals with accuracy. Advertisements must not be misleading, and the information and photographs must be accurate. The price or rent follows the client's instructions, and if the client wants it shown as negotiable the advertisement must say so. Any claim of expertise or success rate must be backed by what CEA calls "verifiable facts and records".

On what the trade calls dummy listings, the tip is direct. An agent must not advertise a property without the owner's prior consent, or a property that is no longer available, in order to attract clients or publicise an area of specialisation. An agent must not copy another person's listing and present it as their own. Advertisements are to be taken down once the property is no longer available or after the estate agency agreement ends. The tip gives no number of days for removal, and it does not set a separate rule on duplicate advertisements beyond the rule on copying.

One case: 94 listings on a single portal

A disciplinary case CEA has published shows how those rules were applied to portal listings. The case, numbered 9/2017 in CEA's list, concerns a property agent who posted 94 rental listings on an online Mandarin-language property portal between 5 January 2016 and 3 February 2016. The published summary carries no decision date. The portal is not named, and the agent is not named here.

According to the summary, 15 of the listings were posted without the owners' consent, and 15 advertised rental properties at stated locations when no such properties were available. The agent used an alias in place of the name registered with CEA, and left out both the CEA registration number and the agency's licence number.

The agent faced 32 charges and pleaded guilty to 7, with the other 25 taken into consideration. The summary cites paragraph 3.8 of the Practice Guidelines on Ethical Advertising, on owner consent and availability, and paragraphs 4 and 12 of the Code of Ethics and Professional Client Care. The financial penalties add up as follows: three charges at S$3,000 each, or S$9,000; three at S$1,500 each, or S$4,500; and one at S$4,000. That is S$17,500, to which fixed costs of S$1,000 were added, for S$18,500 in all.

The case is nearly a decade old and concerns one agent. It is cited for what it shows about the rules: an advertisement for a home that is not available breaches the regulator's guidelines whatever the portal's own terms say.

The industry's attempt to authenticate listings

The companies themselves have said that inaccurate listings are a problem for the trade. An article 99 Group published on its portal, undated as read, describes an Alliance for Action on Accurate Property Listings formed with CEA's support. The article says the alliance was co-led by 99 Group's portal, the Singapore Estate Agents Association and PropertyGuru, and that the five largest agencies and EdgeProp were members.

The plan, as the article describes it, was to spend six months exploring ways to authenticate listings across portals, and to build a prototype digital platform by mid-2022. The platform would assign each property a unique serial number. The stated goal was "100% authenticated listings". The article describes the problem as "dummy or duplicate property advertisements", and quotes Darius Cheung calling fake listings "a massive productivity sink for property agencies and portals."

What became of the prototype is not established by any page read for this guide. The article reports no count of listings removed or agents warned, and no later document on the alliance's outcome was found within the research for this guide. The alliance is reported here as an announced intention, with its announced timetable, and nothing more.

Valuation tools and where the data comes from

Portals also publish price estimates, and these are the tools most easily mistaken for official figures. The clearest published description among the pages read is for X-Value, the estimate offered under the SRX brand.

The SRX page describes X-Value as "a computer-generated appraisal of a home's market value", developed with government and private funding and offered free of charge. It says the estimate uses methods that include comparable market analysis, which means deriving a value from sales of similar homes. On the source of the data, the page refers only to "the nation's most comprehensive property database". It does not name the records behind that database, and it does not say how often the estimate is refreshed. Whether those records include caveats, public housing resale records or transactions reported by agencies is not stated on the page read.

The same page shows that the automated figure is a starting point in SRX's own scheme. It describes a second figure, the X-Listing Price, as the X-Value plus a professional adjustment, a valuer's expertise and goodwill. It offers a Home Report at S$88.00 per unit including GST. And it names a chatbot, Sevi.

PropertyGuru's data products are named in the EQT release, DataSense and ValueNet, and its agent package includes Unit and Project Insights. None of the pages read says which records feed them.

A portal's estimate is a company's calculation, and the page read for this guide does not itemise the database behind it.

What this guide could not confirm

Several points in the subject remain open after the research, and are named so that they are not read as settled.

• EdgeProp's ownership and tools. EdgeProp's own page about the company could not be read. Its membership of the alliance on accurate listings is taken from 99 Group's article. Nothing is stated here about who owns it or how it charges agents.
• 99 Group's prices and audience. No price list for agents and no current audience or listing figure for the group's Singapore portals was read. The only audience claim reported is the 2019 one carried by KrASIA.
• Current ownership stakes. The percentages held in 99 Group by REA Group and others are not established by the reports read. On SRX the sources conflict: Online Marketplaces reported on 9 November 2020 that 99 Group was acquiring it, with completion expected in the second quarter of 2021, while the undated SRX valuation page read in October 2026 still names StreetSine Technology Group and Singapore Press Holdings. No document confirming completion was read.
• PropertyGuru's revenue split. The company's past annual reports to the United States securities regulator were not read, so nothing is said about how much of its revenue comes from agents.
• Verification and duplicate rules. How PropertyGuru verifies a listing, and what any portal's terms say about duplicates, are not set out on the pages read.
• The package grid. The prices, credits and listing counts are paired with package names by column position, as explained above, and the period the ad credits cover is not stated.
• Singapore figures. The audience, agent and listing figures in the EQT release cover four markets for the first half of 2024. No Singapore-only figure was found.

What can be said from the documents is narrower but firm. The largest portal company has been owned by a private equity fund since 13 December 2024. Its published grid, as read on 10 October 2026, shows annual prices from S$2,161 to S$42,425 including GST, and sells position in the results on top. And the regulator's rules on consent, identification and availability apply to every advertisement, whichever company's page it appears on.

Kooky, from Shaka

Kooky edits Agents Estate and builds Shaka, the payment router he made for real estate professionals. One payment comes in, and every agent, agency and party in the deal receives their signed share on closing date.

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