The Real Group Blog

Media Release – For Immediate Release

LAUNCH OF SMARTLOANS.SG – SINGAPORE’S FIRST INSTANT ONLINE MORTGAGE COMPARISON PLATFORM

The Real Group develops new innovative solution to help home buyers and owners compare mortgage rates across 8 major banks in Singapore

Singapore, 6 April 2009 – New and existing home buyers in Singapore can now sleep better at night, knowing that their mortgage is the lowest it can be thanks to SmartLoans – the first-of-its-kind mortgage comparison platform serving the local market. Developed by The Real Group, SmartLoans is a free-to-use online mortgage comparison platform that enables users to easily search, compare and enquire about home loan packages available across 8 different banks. Through SmartLoans, what previously took a couple of hours of research can now take a couple of minutes. More importantly, the unbiased information provided could result in significant cost savings as users can determine which loan package saves them the most amount of money.

Previously, to find the best mortgage rates in town, users had to plough through multiple banking websites, educate themselves on the many loan packages available and calculate interest amounts manually; all of which were complicating and time consuming. Alternatively, they could approach a mortgage broker, resulting in added costs and time spent. With SmartLoans, users enjoy the flexibility of going through the process independent of a third party, as well as the ease and precision of having the system perform the calculations automatically – free of charge. SmartLoans monitors the market closely and updates mortgage rates as soon as there are any changes, ensuring that users are always provided with the most up-to-date information.

The process of getting the best rates through SmartLoans is simple. The SmartWizard tool guides users through a series of short questions and automatically creates the user’s unique “mortgage profile”. This process typically takes about 2-3 minutes in total. Mortgage-related terms such as “locked-in”, or “floating rates” are explained clearly throughout the process, to help first-timers. The SmartWizard also gives details on how to arrive at the best package. For example, it advises users on when it would be best to take up a fixed rate, or when they should avoid taking up a lock-in package.

Upon completion, the SmartWizard presents a chart and table of all applicable loan packages; sorted in ascending order of the cumulative interest they would have to pay throughout the loan tenure. Users can then opt to connect directly with the bank should they decide to find out more from the bank’s loan officer. Should the users eventually take up a mortgage with the bank through SmartLoans, The Real Group gets a commission from the bank. No charge is made to the user.

“SmartLoans gives users more control over the mortgage and refinancing process. We aim to help our customers find the best deal when hunting for a mortgage,” says Vinod Nair, CEO of The Real Group. “Many potential home buyers will find SmartLoans very useful. At the same time, it will also help home buyers who are looking to refinance their existing mortgage compare their options.”

“With the current economic downturn, we needed to refinance our mortgage. We tried SmartLoans and were delighted at how easy and user-friendly it was, even to someone like me who is not familiar with using the Internet. In the end, we found a bank that was able to give us the best refinancing option and are in the process of finalizing the paperwork. Refinancing our loan would potentially save us thousands,” said Mdm Poh, who bought her house in 2006 and is refinancing her $200,000 mortgage.

The Real Group developed SmartLoans using advanced Internet technology and a customer-centric business model. The Real Group is the same team behind HomeSpace.sg and RentSpace.sg – both map-based real estate search engines for Singapore. The Real Group’s founding members comprise of NUS graduates, who aim to enhance and simplify the home buying process.

“I am heartened to see The Real Group developing new innovative solutions for the real estate industry. Although the economic situation has had a dampening effect on the home buying scene, The Real Group have adapted their business model and developed new revenue-generating activities. More importantly, SmartLoans provides real value to its users,” said Prof Wong Poh Kam, Director of the NUS Entrepreneurship Centre, which is incubating The Real Group.

To check out SmartLoans, visit http://www.SmartLoans.sg

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About The Real Group
The Real Group was founded in 2007 and is the same team that brought the popular map-based real estate search engines HomeSpace.sg and RentSpace.sg. The Real Group is funded and supported by MDA and NUS Enterprise. The Real Group continually strives to provide pro-consumer solutions for the real estate industry. http://therealgrp.com/

About NUS Enterprise
NUS Enterprise was established in 2001 as a university-level cluster, to provide an enterprise dimension to NUS teaching and research involving the university’s students, staff and alumni. The functions of the Enterprise cluster complement the academic cluster of the University to nurture talents with an entrepreneurial and global mindset. NUS Enterprise promotes the spirit of innovation and enterprise through experiential education, industry engagement & partnerships and entrepreneurship support. www.nus.edu.sg/enterprise

Media enquires may be directed to:

Chan Yiu Lin
NUS Enterprise
yiulin@greenergrass.com.sg
Mobile: (65) 9765-5897

Amazing. Simply amazing. The power of the media that is.

The Business Times contacted us late last year wanting to do a story. It started off with the focus being the team rather than the product; with interesting angles slanting towards how the brightest ideas may occur not in big, pretentious boardrooms, but in messy garages occupied by “young-twenty-something-internet-punks”.

 Somehow along the way, the product started selling itself more and more (much to our delight) and the story eventually became a full feature about HomeSpace.sg, not the people running it. But hey, we ain’t complaining. Check out the article here.

Since the article was published on February 4th 2008, our site traffic doubled, SMS leads sent out via HomeSpace doubled and sign-ups TRIPPLED! We were very shortly asked to do another interview with Entrepreneur.com.sg. Article here.

The Real Group would like to thank Felda Chay for writing the article and tolerating our never-ending rants.

Today was incredibly tiring… spent the entire day shooting 3 of 5 of our rentspace viral ads… It was incredibly fun and the ads are hilarious… I dunno if my reputation is going to be affected by this but what the hell… Richard Branson has done crazier things.

A BIG thank you to all those who helped out in the ad production today. YY, Mike, Pang Ren, Shaun, Sara, Denise and Justin! You guys are awesome! We really really appreciate it!

The tech team is going to start working on RentSpace at the end of the week… So many people have been asking me about it.. Sorry for the delay, but we’re tied up putting some final usability tweaks to HomeSpace. That should be done by the end of this week, and then an alpha version of RentSpace should be out by the following week.

I’d like to thank our early beta testers for helping us sort out bugs and for giving us suggestions on how to improve. We’ve sorted out as much as possible in this short time frame and we’re finally launching our marketing campaign… From just  our little marketing “experiments” we’ve managed to garner about 40 signups in 24 hours and it doesn’t seem like its going to slow down. Look out Singapore, here we come! Thanks for all your support! We could not have done it without you.

We’re working on some cool features and are looking for talented software engineers who love what we’re doing and want to be part of the team. Drop a mail to vinod at homespace.sg and I’ll be in touch. 

I was once again chillin’ out with my advertising guru friend over beers and somehow (as always), we started talking about Mediacorp’s questionable strategy of spreading the Mocca brand.

 ”What the hell were they thinking?” was my approach to the matter and loving to play devil’s advocate, he pointed out that like it or not, their “all-out” advertising campaign was a huge success. Why so?

Let’s face it. Within a month from its launch, almost every Singaporean has come to know of Mocca.com. People either talk about it or shoot spoof videos of the muscle dude and post them on YouTube (go check them out). In a nutshell, top-of-mind recall was emminent and perhaps that was Mediacorp’s number one objective.

The flip side of the argument however, is that people don’t always talk about or remember Mocca.com in a positive way. No doubt there is top-of-mind recall, but what is the point of that if they don’t recall anything great about it? Countless forums speak of its bad marketing and countless people take a piss out of its silly ad concepts.

Mocca’s tv ads have also been focusing heavily on its video embedding capability. Visiting the website however shows no such ads that have embedded videos of ordinary folks advertising their wares. Is the market not ready for this feature? Did Mediacorp play too many cards at one shot too soon?

Perhaps the 1o min video in “The Ries Report” (http://www.riesreport.com/index.php?month=10) is enough to illustrate where Mediacorp went wrong in their marketing strategy. Al Ries (marketing guru) elaborates on the difference between a commonly used ”big-bang” approach versus a “slow build up” approach, and why waiting for the right time (tipping point) to advertise “all-out” will yield a much greater ROI.

Our conclusion: Mediacorp doesn’t have a baaaaaad product (though we love saying it). The only thing that was reeeeeeally bad was their timing. The moment Mocca.com was launched, they almost immediately blasted the whole Singapore 24/7 with advertisments that have only served to set expectations way high. When people went to the website and realized that “it ain’t that great”, credibilty fell. And everyone knows that when a new product emerges in the market and loses credibility from day one, it’s going to take a miracle to gain it back.

What they could have done was to simply sell the fact that people can now turn to an online classifieds platform as opposed to the traditional newspaper classifieds. That capability already sells itself. Afterwhich, they can then focus on selling their search function which should really be their back-bone core feature because the truth is, searching for an item over the newspaper classifieds really just sucks.

When they start to win over early adopters and the early majority (hence stabalizing their initial user-base), they can then execute their “all-out-blast-the-whole-Singapore” advertising approach, not just because they have the easy means to, but because by then, they would have had a more solid product and a stronger user-base to back up their claims. And over time, when the masses have further grown to accept and approve the website, market the video embedding feature, which by then, should result in a higher acceptance and adoption rate.

But with all that has been said and done, alas…it might already be too late for them…

We’ll see…

I was recently interviewed by Gwen Tan from SGEntrepreneurs.  Actually, we did an email interview a few weeks ago, but I had to tell her to hold off on the publishing because I didn’t wanna generate too much buzz when the site was not quite ready yet.

Me and the tech team have been staying overnight at the office for the past few days to meet the requirements for the launch. Staelen looks zombified from the lack of proper sleep for the past 2 days… We’re just working really hard to bring the best damn product possible. Possibly even rivalling US sites… The Biz team and myself have been prepping for a couple of presentations we have lined up next week, which hopefully land us some funding so that we can market this

We’re definitely going to be one of the first few companies in the world to launch a full frontal assault youtube marketing campaign. I met a bunch of really cool and talented animation and film guys from NTU and we’re gonna be working with them to produce a series of hilarious viral video adn print ads. You can look forward to that sometime in November.  In the mean time, if you have any feedback or comments reply to this post and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can

Ok I’ll admit it’s abit lame… but what the hell… I hate that ad so much, I thought I’d do a voiceover, Borat style….