Yahoo Finance 
Greyloft – the startup digitising Singapore’s real estate market
The process of buying property in Singapore is widely regarded as complex, frustrating and expensive. The government has long been addressing property cooling measures, and in the second quarter of 2016 residential prices fell 1.5%.
Mortgage-owners recently received a break when it comes to refinancing thanks to the reshaping of the Total Debt Servicing Ratio. All’s well and good – but the reform that Singapore’s real estate market needs could stem from elsewhere.
That’s certainly the thinking of Siddhesh Narayanan and Archit Agarwal, who are the brains behind a startup that aims to digitise the market, bringing the process of home buying totally online from start to finish.
Meet Greyloft
Source: Greyloft
The enterprise has recently raised $1.1 million in seed funding to achieve its vision of the rebirth of the real estate market. Its vision has two facets. The first is to give buyers and sellers a single digital platform to help with residential sales and lettings end-to-end. The second is to create business for its estate agents.
Estate agents have long been the enemy of the real estate market. These linchpins of the sales and lettings process are frequently accused of a conflict of interest – misaligning their own motives with those of the buyers, sellers and tenants they represent.
Money-hungry agents are often depicted as trying to maximise their own take-home earnings, rather than accommodate and satisfy their client 100%.
By bringing estate agents on board, it aims to not undercut them but synchronise the process of home buying by pairing agents with customers, and harnessing the different agency procedures by moving everything online.
Keeping everything under one roof is easier for consumers and agents, and Greyloft aims to make buying or letting a property a more customer-focused experience. Here’s how it works.
Source: Greyloft
What’s in it for the agents?
Greyloft engages agents through a customer relationship management system. The system uses current processes and introduces new ones, including the management of multiple deals, streamlining paperwork, monitoring client requests and seamlessly transitioning clients between different agents.
Ultimately, Greyloft wants its system to economise on time so that agents can focus on the type of outstanding customer service that gets them word-of-mouth recommendations.
What’s in it for the consumers?
Source: Greyloft
As well as an improved relationship with one or multiple agents, the consumer can benefit from an entirely linear process of home buying from start to finish, enhanced through sophisticated data and analytics.
Potential customers will use Greyloft to browse online for available properties. They will identify which ones they’re interested in and Greyloft will pair them with one of their approved letting agents.
The agent will take them to view their handpicked properties, guide them through negotiations and finalise the legal agreements. The process will be digitised even further with the introduction of an online tool that allows consumers to add notes and photos to properties they’ve visited – a bit like a giant online pin board.
Contracts, paperwork and feedback are all handled online – and that includes post-sale assistance, comments or complaints, which can be logged online, even after moving in, and resolutions will be provided.
Data-driven investment advice
To make the home buying process even quicker and simpler, Greyloft is building a team that will focus on collating data on local real estate trends. This will help buyers make more informed decisions based on past, present and future sales volumes and figures.
This type of detail is where Greyloft's Siddhesh believes individual brokers let their customers down. He believes their inability to crunch the numbers and inform consumers on where the best investments are located is a data-driven gap in the market that Greyloft can fill.
Greyloft has admitted problems in initially getting agents on board, saying it had found slow take-up in the adoption of the platform and an understanding of the relationship management tools.
But with healthy competition from online estate agent rivals PropertyGuru, which is introducing virtual reality viewing of properties, and 99.co, which offers property viewing via the web and an app, many experts believe the recent negative impact on Singapore’s real estate market, caused by slow economic growth, is about to make a U-turn.
As the tides of the industry change, Siddesh and Archit envisage their customer-service focused, streamlined approach to digital property selling and renting in Singapore as the next generation. While they are fine-tuning their recipe in Singapore at the moment, they’ve described Greyloft as pan-Asian, and have expressed interest in branching into other markets.
(By Sarah Thorp)
Related Articles
- 5 expert tips to be the best fintech startup in Asia
- Five of Singapore’s most exciting startups
- What is happening in Singapore property markets?
