Hong Kong-based digital property marketing firm Spacious eyes overseas expansion

From a small office in Sheung Wan, Spacious founder Asif Ghafoor is plotting to reshape Hong Kong’s property market. The website he created in 2013, in part to deal with unscrupulous estate agents and old fashioned marketing tactics, has grown substantially this year, and Ghafoor is now trying to expand one of Hong Kong’s first home-grown proptech companies into the Greater Bay Area and overseas.

Six years since inception, Spacious is now one of the go-to websites for buyers and sellers in Hong Kong, gathering data on everything from search inquiries to prices. The site had 1.7 million unique visitors in 2019, about 80 per cent of them from Hong Kong, along with approximately 35,000 properties for rent, 25,000 for sale, and between four and five thousand sellers of various sizes, according to Ghafoor’s estimates. Simplified and traditional Chinese versions of the website are running, with 25 staff and US$3.5 million in funding secured in two rounds.

Ghafoor and his chief operating officer, James Fischer, are now pitching their growing database of Hong Kong property searchers to developers and agents in Australia, the UK, the US and Southeast Asia.

Ghafoor estimated that as much as a quarter of Spacious’ revenue this year will be from overseas clients, up from less than 5 per cent in 2018. Revenue grew 60 per cent year on year in 2019, allowing Spacious to break even. Meanwhile, the company has added agents in Zhongshan and Zhuhai, as well as offices in Shanghai, Shenzhen and Taipei.

Ghafoor had the idea for Spacious during his relocation to Hong Kong from London in 2008.

The former Goldman Sachs software engineer said he was surprised at how out-of-date Hong Kong’s property marketing sector was. “It was pretty poor. That was surprising, compared to how much money is at stake. But the online process was a million miles behind what was happening in the US and the UK,” he said.