Singaporean Entrepreneurs

Vinod Nair went to California a student and came back to Singapore a full-fledge entrepreneur (although he is still in the midst of finishing up his degree at NUS). Here, he spends some time answering our questions on his personal growth and insights in what has been and continues to be a tumultuous ride of a startup. He also offers his view of Singapore’s real estate landscape both off and online and the plans of Homespace.sg to revolutionize the market. Soon (we hope very soon), the days of dirty fingertips and strained eyes scouring the classifieds for property information will be gone. All we can say is, “It’s about time!”

(1) What were your biggest take away lesson/s from spending time in a Silicon Valley start-up?

I think having worked in a Silicon Valley start-up gave me some kind of experience and a certain level of confidence and knowledge on how to go about working on my own start-up. Its always about the people first, not the idea. Once you get the right people on board, everything kinda falls into place on it’s own. Team dynamics have to be there, if not there’s bound to be problems down the road.

(2) Give us your vision of Web 2.5 for the space that you are in. How do you think people will be buying/selling/renting on the internet 3-5 years from now?

I think the foundations for “Web 2.5″ are starting to come out. We are going to see more interactivity in applications, and more WMD (Web, Mobile, Desktop) synergies. We’re also slowly seeing a move towards the direction of contextual knowledge and Facebook and Google have been leading the front on this. We’ll soon see user intentions being predicted based on social interactions and what others in our social circle are doing…

(3) You seem quite young to be entering a space usually reserved for those at least in their mid-20′s, 30′s (i.e., have some money). Given this, we’re wondering if you have ever tried to buy real-estate in Singapore yourself? If yes, what were the issues that you faced and how are these addressed in homespace.sg?

Yes, we’re young.. I look at that as an advantage rather than a disadvantage. We have nothing to lose and everything to gain. I think we’re in a great position given the real estate boom and the fact that people are starting to move away from traditional media and go online.

While I may not have bought any real estate yet, I’m currently taking the real estate certification course to familiarize myself with the industry. When we started our company last year, many of my friends and myself had no clue where to get started. There was the classifieds, which was a pain in the ass because its just pages and pages of tiny text without any substantial information.

Then I checked out alot of sites online, and it was just a web version of classifieds which allowed people to upload pictures and more information. I had seen a couple of really cool real estate web applications in the states and nobody was doing it here. There was no innovation, and nothing that really helped people find homes in an easier and smarter way. Most of the time, the first thing people have in mind when it comes to looking for real estate is location. HomeSpace.sg allows people to do visual shopping for real estate by checking out the area on a map with all the homes for sale listed on it. You can even type in any MRT, Shopping mall or school and see if there are any homes available in that area.

(4) How long did it take from concept to execution? During this time, how did you keep your staff/friends motivated to keep going? (We understand you didn’t pay them or did we misunderstand?!)

We started working on HomeSpace in May 07. Everyone was a partner with stake in the company. There was no pay so everyone had to feel like they were contributing to something that was going to be worth more than a monthly salary in the long run. There were times when things were moving slowly, and in such times you really have to focus on the long term goals rather than the immediate shortcomings. We were also very lucky to have a alot of our friends encouraging us along the way. We had some minor failures along the way… initially people were not receptive towards an advertising and subscription model. But when you fail, it forces you to seriously rethink your strategy and most of the time, you come up with an even better one..

(5) Does the Real Group own all the technology behind the website? With the level of detail in the maps, the number of items you can cross-sell are enormous.

The map itself is powered by Google and we have layered our application on top of that. There are 2 key technologies that we have developed to date, SmartPins and the HomeSpace Listing Engine. SmartPins, is the technology that each real estate pin on the map, knows what other pins are in the vicinity. We’ve mainly used this technology so far to determine nearby amenities and distances to each of them.

The HomeSpace Listing Engine, does a lot of the tedious work, when you list a home. All we really need is just the Zip code, and we can determine the address, the location on the map and the surrounding amenities. This saves the seller alot of time and gives the potential buyer more accurate information. The more information you put up, the more likely you are to sell the home. because the buyer has so much choice on HomeSpace, we rank quality listings higher to provide an incentive for people to put up pictures and more information.

NOTE: We love the interface of the site as its very easy to use while giving you lots of information (but because its graphical, not overwhelming). However, when we tried to sign up, we got the sms, but no email. It turned out later that we did get the email but our over exuberant junk mail filter had chomped it up. Vinod informed us its still in beta, release 1.0 will be coming soon so those kinks should be ironed out.

In the meantime, you should definitely check out homespace.sg because Vinod and his team will definitely go places! (pun intended) We also suggested for Vinod to quit school and focus on this already but he declined to comment on that. ;D