♪ haslinda: hello and welcome to "high flyers," the show that gives you a 360 degree view of asia's business elite. today we meet a man who turned frustrations about the property sector into a multimillion dollar business. when starting out, he knew practically nothing about real estate in southeast asia. today he dominates it. let us meet property guru steve melhuish.

starting from scratch, steve had a tough time building the company's balance sheet. but he held on to the belief that if you build it, they will come. with over 14 million monthly users, property guru is now one of the largest internet real estate sites in the region. hi, steve. it is time for this high flyer to join us to tell us how he built a humble foundation. ♪ steve melhuish welcome to "high , flyers." steve: thank you very much. haslinda: when you were a young lad at the age of seven, mom came home one day after seeing the headmaster. she was upset and she was crying. the headmaster had told her that steve wouldn't be doing anything with himself. she must have been sorely disappointed. little did she know that steve

would one day be the ceo of a company. it all began because you couldn't find a house in singapore. tell us about it. steve: correct. i was living in singapore in 2006, and for those who know about singapore the market being , very quiet for about eight years. i was renting a property, and the whole property market exploded. i had to move out of the house pretty fast because there was an enforced block sale. i had to move out pretty fast, my wife and i. the first thing we did as recently arrived foreigners was to go online. what surprised me was that there was absolutely nothing online. the only way to find property was to look in the newspapers and three lines of text which were completely meaningless, villa marina and something about psf and a telephone number. it was hugely frustrating and stressful because the market was

so hot and we had no clue about what was going on in the market. there was just nothing. it struck me that not only was it a frustrating process, but also it's a potential opportunity here. at that stage everyone i was drivers, to, taxi people at work, they were all talking about properties. haslinda: what a brave move, in a property market you did not know anything about it you said about. in your own words, you said you were clueless. that was brave. steve: yes. i broke my golden rule of choosing a market or business that you are passionate about or you know and also choosing a large market. i chose singapore, a village in the global scale, and property that i had no idea about. at the same time, the real big players in this market were very large media companies. we sort of take that on and try to change the whole industry. to do that was a challenging task. we started slowly, we bootstrap

ped the business and started off with four of us in a tiny shop house in chinatown and got the website out in december 2007 and slowly started to grow the business. haslinda: you did not go on holiday for 18 months and did not pay yourself for how long? steve: the first five years were pretty grueling. it was like a prison sentence. myself and my partner, we were working seven days a week, 14 hours a day for those five years and we did not take any vacations for those five years, the first year no salary. , all the money was going to the staff and building the business. haslinda: you did not have any experience starting a business, but you did have experience in the corporate life. steve: i spent 12 years or so in corporate life in the telecom industry. i wanted to run the business with a professional approach and i spent some time investing in

businesses for an investment bank i was helping, and also some investments i have personally made. i had gone through the investment process and helping companies raise money. when it came to raising money for our company, it was easier. haslinda: you also had some failures. steve: absolutely, i started my own business which was a consulting business and i realized it was hard to scale you are kind of relying on one person, which is myself. i invested in additional media business in finland. the founder did not want to grow it, despite the fact that we have made investments in the business in singapore that failed completely as a result of the founders and the investors falling out. i realized how important it is to have supportive shareholders. haslinda: how do you overcome failures and identify another venture which could potentially fail? how did the wife cope with that?

steve: i am a challenge freak. haslinda: you say you are a dreamer. steve: i am a dreamer. i believe i can do stuff. in many cases, i have not done this stuff because i have failed so my wife tells me i'm a dreamer. i believe i can change the world and do things. i have not always been successful at doing that. i am also a very competitive me,on and that has driven that challenge and competition. it means you are taking on a big challenge wishes around making that market transparent for the consumer. and helping the consumer. haslinda: is there a time where you doubted it would take off? steve: my wife was the one who doubted it. haslinda: she was the sole breadwinner. steve: she was funding my expiration adventure -- exploration adventure. she had seen the previous failure so she was a little skeptical about this but once she started to see the revenues coming in and we got cash flow

positive and profitable in 2011, she knew it was not just a dream. it is becoming a reality. i am fortunate to have financial support but more important, the whole emotional support from her which really helped me through that process. haslinda: can you think of a low point? steve: there were so many low points. in the early days particularly, it just felt like an extreme roller coaster. you had the highest highs and the lowest lows in the same day in the same week. at the time when the business was so fragile, you had 20 people and any setback felt like the end of the world. it just consumes your living and breathing had space for weeks. weeks. space for fast forward two or three months later and you wonder what the big fuss is about. and you are on to your next crisis. haslinda: you had to make a pitch to property agents. the first was a group of 50. for our viewers, it was a chinese dialect. what was the reception and how

did you feel? steve: i remember it like it was yesterday. it was my first sales pitch for the business in december, 2007, talking to these 50 agents. i recently arrived off the boat and was speaking with a british accent. i was talking about the internet, which was a completely different world. i got this blur of faces looking back at me and they said we are you in an would try and they got some success. they told their colleagues and they told their colleagues, and at the end you of the first year, we had and will 1000 agents paying for an our services. haslinda: now you have 35,000? steve: now we have 35,000, a stronger brand and more loyalty , from the consumer point of view. consumers as well as on the advertiser side. haslinda: have you been surprised by your success looking back? steve: absolutely, when we do the original business plan

together, the five-year business plan, it was just singapore and it was about where we got to. normally, business plans are wildly optimistic and in our case, we far exceeded that. i think timing played a role but also the ongoing group brute force of getting it done and innovating, continually innovating and improving and improving and improving. we were competing with big giants in the industry. they had also launched of their own services and spending a lot of money and we had no money and no people. no brand. we had to compete with some of these guys and it was very , very scary. we took a very entrepreneurial approach and kept changing and improving. the giants were slower's to adapt -- slower to adapt. haslinda: coming up -- steve: we will not go like pokemon go but reality will come

into play. haslinda: why not? ♪

♪ haslinda: steve, the first five years, building the company in singapore were tough, but the years afterward even tougher when you tried to expand in three other market in a period of three months. steve: it was a pretty extreme way of doing business. it was an interesting lesson. we went from that one country to four countries in three months. probably a stupid thing to do. haslinda: why were you in a hurry? steve: we spent the first for four or five years building the business in singapore and did a positive cash flow. market leadership in singapore. we were having conversations with the board and we thought maybe is the time to expand internationally. we looked at all the markets and spent time and found these companies and we thought

malaysia looks interesting, indonesia looks interesting, thailand looks interesting. and we started talking with more companies in india and acquiring small businesses and small websites. i guess we were excited to -- entrepreneurs want to do everything at the same time. if we do not go now, we may miss the opportunity, so let's just go now. the downside was the fact that the whole of the singapore organization was focused on singapore. suddenly we said, by the way, we are going to build a website in malaysia and we want to hire 50 people and do a branding campaign and the same in thailand and indonesia. over a period of about two years, we stretched all the organization. haslinda: you also thought you could replicate the singapore model. that did not work out. steve: that was naive in hindsight. we thought we built this fantastic business in singapore so we just cut and pasted into the other markets. but property is a personalized and personal thing. in each market, we realized

afterwards and through a lot of mistakes, was that people look for property and have different criteria in each of these markets. in singapore, people want to be in a condo and they know where it is and find the property and carry on. somewhere like bangkok, it's all around transport. it is around m.i.t. stations and therefore, neighborhoods and map was far more important. cutting and pasting the singapore model into for example bangkok, failed. likewise in countries like malaysia and indonesia, land is important. people are buying land and building houses was important. that did not really happen in singapore. haslinda: you acquired some companies for expansion. acquisitions, more acquisitions in the next 12, 24 months? steve: potentially, yes. the way the business model works, it's far more important to be strong in a small number of markets rather than having pins on a map across 10 markets.

so we want to build the breadth and depth in those existing four we are, which is why acquired these businesses. it's all around strengthening those four existing markets. in the next one or two years, the focus will be on building the brits and depth in those dth and depthea in that market. haslinda: you have managed to secure an important shareholder tpg. what does that branding do? does it help you raise funds? steve: tpg brings the brand and the region, the network and the expertise in certain sectors to us. also, the local reach in malaysia indonesia and , singapore. when we want to talk to government industry, the owners of some of these real estate industry businesses, in many cases, they are wealthy billionaires and wealthy

multimillionaires, and tpg is well-connected and we can access those individuals. haslinda: where do you see innovation in property guru? steve: it has been a key reason for the success of the business. you think about where we were seven years ago. everyone was using traditional media. now, it is all online. consumers all have smartphones and having usable services on a , smart phone is important and personalizing that content is important, making sure you provide lots of content. we published 600 or 700 articles and property reviews on specific projects every single month. as we go forward in the next three to five years virtual , reality will play a role. we not going to go pokemon go yet. haslinda: why not? steve: in the future in five years time, people will probably view online with virtual reality. it will be an immersive environment.

they will probably book the viewing online, and go into the house or property through some kind of smart device. camera recognizing them. letting them in, letting them out. buying the property through crowd financing, potentially. interaction potentially with artificial intelligence, so to say i will like a property near the river, and you get a response back. your personal concierge is helping you find that property. the next three to five years, technology will play an important role. the implication means less agents but the agents there will be better equipped, both in terms of the service they provide and the tools they provide. haslinda: 16 million hits per month and transactions worth about $12 billion per year but rising competition as well. 99.co, for instance. what are you going to do?

steve: competition is good and healthy and it just means everyone steps up their game. the consumer gets a better deal. what does that mean for us? that means we have to continually innovate and we have been doing that for the last nine years. we are in the early stages of this market evolution where the consumers are online. the industry and advertisers are moving online. haslinda: four markets in nine years, where do you go from here? what are your aspirations? steve: if we look back at where things were seven years ago, the where we are now, we definitely made market is more transparent and easier to navigate and less confusing. have we solved the problem? it's the whole search process. is it easier today? i would say no. there are still some areas we need to fix. that is really what keeps us awake. how do we make sure the consumers can find that property propertyd finance that easily? haslinda: where would you like to be in terms of markets? good to see a global plan eventually?

-- could you see a global plan eventually? steve: for the next two or three years, i can see us going to one or two additional markets in southeast asia. longer-term, why not? the middle east potentially, india, china perhaps less so. it is very mature and quite competitive already. to be honest the markets we , operate in today are two very large market. there is a population of 600 million people and $140 billion market in real estate. the online and e-commerce markets are exploding. we sit in the middle of this 600 million population and $140 billion property market and also online and smartphone explosion and we are in the middle of all of that. i don't know what can be more exciting than that. haslinda: coming up -- steve: i was taking phone calls in the hospital when my wife was just about to give birth and negotiating the terms of the contracts. that was a particularly crazy time. ♪

♪ haslinda: steve melhuish, you are successful but people don't know you were a disruptive kid. tell us about the days growing up. steve: i am not sure if disruptive kid is the right way of phrasing it. my life was disrupted. i was an army brat. my father was an officer in the army and we moved around every two years. new home, new school, new friends, unpacking crates, repacking crates and moving into the horrible army accommodations with orange camouflage furniture. haslinda: school was a problem. you became the second top student. the only other person above you was a student with two c's and a d. steve: i went to forces school

, and that was in germany. probably not the best quality school in the world. i was happy that i became the second highest. thank you for pointing that out. haslinda: your mom was the biggest influence on you because your dad was in the army and constantly away. what kind of influence? you do take after her? steve: if i reflect some of the values in me and when i have brought into my life and business, much of that has come for my mother. my father was traveling a lot. he was on exercise. that there was conflict in northern ireland and he spent time there. certainly my mother brought me and my sister up and i think shaped who we are. haslinda: because you were constantly moving when you were growing up, it made you more adaptable as a person. that must have helped when building a business. steve: i think it has helped in terms of building a business,

and also how i manage my life. being able to get on with people and sit in, and adapt to circumstances no matter what and also being outside your comfort zone because you constantly have to adapt to a new environment and new friends. that definitely has an impact. in an organization where you have multiple nationalities, i think we have 18 nationalities in my company, that is very important. it's such a people business. it's important that you can work with multiple people from multiple backgrounds. haslinda: you were very focused on building property guru and in that time, your wife was very focused on having a family. your work impacted the family life. that led to ivf over three countries. it must have been difficult. steve: this is one of the challenging times. the first five years of building the business consumed almost 100% of my time and there was

not much time left with my wife. we were not having kids on our own so we had to go to through fertility process which was difficult for my wife. it was not only financially demanding but also it was mentally as well as physically demanding. i am thankful that at the end of twins,e have two lovely four years old. it has added a new passion and a dimension to my life -- it's been great fun. steve: both of you were rewarded at somewhat the same time. it was a coincidence that you managed to secure funding and then the kids came around. steve: absolutely. it happened at the same time. we were in the middle of finalizing our investment with deutsche telecom at that stage. i was taking phone calls in the hospital while my wife is about to give birth and negotiating the terms of the contract. my cofounder would come in and sit in the hospital cafe and have a conversation about terms and would go back. it was right in the middle of

all of that. it was a particularly crazy time. haslinda: in hindsight, what lessons can be learned from your journey so far? there are so many interested people. what should other people know? steve: the key thing is to try. things can look completely daunting. if you don't try, you don't succeed and something, that would be the first thing. the second thing which is really important, even though i kind of ,ent against my own golden rule choose a big opportunity and a challenge to the market and solve that problem. in our case, it was around finding the property, navigating was very confusing in a transparent market. finding something that is big and frustrating and causing a lot of pain, and address that. those would be the key things. think about how you are helping someone. haslinda: ipo, is that in the plan are not? steve: we had an investment 12 months ago and it was a big round. we are fully capitalized.

we don't need money to fund the rest of the business. we will be turning profitable next year. we don't need additional money. ipo may be longer-term as an option. we shall consider that in the future but we are not in a hurry. haslinda: your vision for property guru, 10, 20 years down the road? where do you see the company going? steve: we want to be the go-to place across all markets we operate in. haslinda: do you see yourself already a household name? steve: in some of those markets. we have 16 million out of the 600 million who are using us on a monthly basis, there is obviously a long way to go. there are additional markets which we will look at. yes, in some of those markets, we are a market leader. in singapore, malaysia, indonesia, and thailand. but the markets are also still evolving. there is a whole online adoption that is still taking place. yeah, we are still building. haslinda: only just beginning,

steve melhuish thank you so , much. ♪

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