PropertyGuru: Transforming Public Company Culture Through Values

So, a new grad walks into a boardroom….

It’s a rare moment when an executive team walks into a room and lets the recent university grad have a voice at the table for a critical planning meeting. For CEO Hari Krishnan, watching that scene play out was the moment he knew PropertyGuru had transformed its culture. 

PropertyGuru is the leading property technology platform in Southeast Asia with approximately US$110m in annual revenue and US$575m in market cap (think Zillow in Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, & Thailand). Krishnan shared the planning meeting story in describing PropertyGuru’s culture & business evolution. Not only had the new grad data scientist spoken up during the meeting, but she also made a recommendation aligned with company values, earning the support of the leadership team.

That moment captures how important values have been to PropertyGuru’s last decade. Krishnan joined PropertyGuru in 2016 after serving as LinkedIn’s APAC Managing Director. PropertyGuru needed to evolve its culture from a gritty startup into a durable market leader and successful public company. Looking back on the journey, Krishnan describes the unorthodox road of driving cultural transformation through values, not purpose.

Going values-first

Most US & Western companies build culture by first creating a vision statement. Inspire your team by envisioning an exciting future and transformative long-term goal. That is the playbook offered by luminaries like Jim Collins & Jerry Porras in their book Built to Last. Start with vision, and reinforce culture through values. Krishnan experienced that playbook himself as a leader at LinkedIn & Cisco.

PropertyGuru went the opposite direction, going values-first to transform its culture. In 2016, creating a long-term goal felt less relevant because the business was growing using the shared objective to be a trusted advisor for property seekers. When Hari asked employees about what higher purpose motivated them, they were confused and gave divergent answers. Why did PropertyGuru need a higher-order goal?

What was consistent was a shared ethos - to be scrappy, resilient, diverse, and open to new opinions. These resembled values, which in Krishnan’s experience were equally motivating to employees. More importantly, values felt like a more important starting place for a SE Asian company. US companies are achievement and goal-oriented first, taking their lead from mainstream US culture. Set the big vision so everyone individually knows what goals to go after and be evaluated against. In Asia, the collective is more important, and transforming the culture means prioritizing community strength first. 

Going values-first grounded PropertyGuru in a solid foundation to grow the business. The values were both foundational and aspirational. And as Krishnan describes it, PropertryGuru needed to do a lot of delivering to evolve. Up to that point, PropertyGuru nailed its value proposition - users trusted the site to find property (Krishnan himself used it to find his family’s first home in Singapore). But, PropertyGuru was little more than a simple classified ads website. It felt Web 1.0 like Craigslist. There was no data, no payments, no modern user or mobile product experience. Guru was literally just listings.

PropertyGuru used its values to change that. For example, in 2016 the company made the hard decision to remove its most expensive and most in-customer-demand ad unit. The problem, it was a giant take-over ad and a horrible user experience. As the values came into focus, the product team took the ad down to the confusion of founders, customers, and sales leaders. The decision left a gaping revenue hole to fill, but the team acted out of “respect” for users and “pushed beyond good.” Krishnan rightly assumed it would innovate to greater growth by putting users first, not selling more takeover ads. 

Another example is PropertyGuru’s mobile app, a reflection of its value to “create what’s next.” PropertyGuru created its platform nearly 20 years ago before the launch of the iPhone, and was slow to go mobile. The culture transformation inspired technology innovation in delivering the property industry’s first visual search in the mobile experience.

Employees increasingly sign up to work for a company with strong values. PropertyGuru has experienced strong growth on its values-first foundation. It's now the market share leader multiple times over across its various SE Asian markets. Where many tech companies have struggled post-COVID, PropertyGuru has succeeded, growing revenue ~25% annually over the past four years. Also, the company has gone from losing money to having nearly double-digit profit margins. It went public as a SPAC in early 2022, succeeding as a public company where so many other SPAC IPOs have struggled.

And from a values standpoint, PropertyGuru’s team continues to thrive. Today the company has around 1,600 employees represented by 31 nationalities and a 65:35 female-to-male diversity ratio, unheard of for a US tech company. It was recognized as Asia’s Top Employer in Technology by Influential Brands in 2022 & 2023.

Transforming through vision, it’s time!

So where does PropertyGuru go from here?

Krishnan and the team decided it was finally time to focus on long-term vision in 2023. With a strong culture and business foundation, the leadership team engaged employees to create a shared long-term goal for the future. The result is nothing short of inspirational.

The statement reflects the evolution from property classified into a full platform with a longer-term focus on creating a lasting sustainable impact on SE’s Asia rapid urbanization. PropertyGuru sits at the heart of three megatrends in Asia: 1) urbanization, 2) the emergence of the middle class, and 3) digitization. In Western countries, these have evolved gradually over a century. In Asia, all three are rapidly evolving in real-time. Tomorrow’s cities are being built today in a new paradigm. Many of them aspire to be built in a “15-minute” size where everything you need is walkable in 15 minutes. They’re often leveraging public-private partnerships with modern infrastructure. They’re aiming to be built green to have an environmental impact in mind and in some cases affordably to make property accessible for the middle class.

The company sees itself at the heart of this social transformation. Powering communities to thrive means not just listing properties but helping buyers understand how property is built, measure its sustainability impact, identify financing options, and understand its access to public goods. Supporting communities means empowering a shift in fairness and equitable access.

PropertyGuru’s culture has shown it can transform its own business through its value. We can’t wait to see the impact it has on SE Asia as it realizes its vision.