I had a look at this recently and came to conclusion that iproperty has the feel of a gunna. Next year it is going to be the next realestate.com.au, but next year never comes.
In 2012 it had negative operational cashflow of $4.2 million. That's worse than 2011 where it only lost $1.8 million. It looks like it is on track to lose another $4 million in 2013 with a 1Q13 cash outflow of $1.1 million. In addition they keep buying more businesses. In 1Q2013 they bought a property expo business for $1.7 million. At March 2013 they had cash of $8.2 million. If things keep going they will need another capital raising at the end of year/early next year.
They are spread over four (or five) different countries: Malaysia, Hong Kong, Indonesia and Singapore (and Macau if that counts) and they launched a commercial property website in 2012. That's a lot of balls to keep in the air. It's no wonder their Singapore site lost the battle to be the dominant website in Singapore when only 18 months ago it was equally placed with its competitors.
There is a long, long way to go before things get profitable in Hong Kong (2012 revenue $1.7 million) and Indonesia (2012 revenue $0.9 million).
Their biggest competitor in Indonesia, rumah.com, is owned by PropertyGuru which received a $17 million capital injection from a German website, in 2012. I can guess PropertyGuru will be happy to engage in war of costly losses in Indonesia to wipeout iproperty's website, rumah123. See http://www.propertyportalwatch.com/2012/06/propertyguru-valued-at-s144m-us112m-by-immoscout24/
It states it is No1 in Hong Kong but the chinese-language website eng.28hse.com is much more highly ranked on Alexa and has a lot more agents (6,000) vs gohome.hk.com (900 at end 2012).
Finally by the time, they actually start looking to make money there is the possibility of some left field development which makes it hard to achieve the dominance that realestate.com.au now has in Australia. I'm not an IT expert so I don't know what it is, but given the speed things change in IT, I wouldn't be surprised if something comes up.
What do you reckon?
IPP Price at posting:
71.5¢ Sentiment: None Disclosure: Not Held
