Lai See | Property start-up Spacious ready for regional rollout
The website Spacious started in mid-2013 with an ambitious target - to shake up Hong Kong's online residential property market by introducing a higher level of transparency into listings and taking some of the pain out of renting or buying a property.
Ghafoor says traffic to the site is growing at a rate of 25 per cent month on month or 1,600 per cent a year. He is particularly pleased that Savills Hong Kong, one of the biggest agents in the city, has recently signed up and another big agent is expected to join shortly.
"This not only improves the quality of listings and therefore the user experience, but it's also validation that we're doing something right," says Ghafoor. "Our inventory monitoring and pricing algorithms mean we can weed out the fake listings some agents use to bait customers while providing an independent assessment of fair value."
It has recently set up agreements with other agents in London, New York and Miami that are looking to sell their properties to Asian buyers.
Spacious raised US$500,000 early last year and is now seeking new funding to scale up its business. The site is now available in Chinese. In the middle of last year, it launched a mobile app. Now roughly half the traffic is from mobile.
Ghafoor was keen to introduce transparency into the market. For this, he drew on his 11 years of experience with Goldman Sachs writing equity trading algorithms. So the site includes a fascinating range of metrics. Users can see whether a flat is over- or undervalued against others in the same building or neighbourhood. They can compare average prices in the neighbourhood with others in the city and see how prices have changed over different time periods.