SPEEDRENT TECHNOLOGY

SUMMARY VIDEO

COMPANY DETAILS

 

Speedrent Technology Sdn Bhd incorporated in 2016 founded by Wong Whei Meng, a serial entrepreneur who exited 3 businesses prior. The company currently operates 2 online platforms, namely speedhome.com and speedmanage.com. The company started as brand name SPEEDRENT as a rental-focused platform, then rebranded to SPEEDHOME in April 2019 for foray into property sales transactions. As of now, SPEEDHOME allows property owners to post for-sales listings for free while the company does not have any monetisation activity yet for sales transactions.

SPEEDHOME is the safest end-to-end property transaction platform. The platform allows the landlord and tenant to deal directly in a fast, easy and efficient manner. Landlords are better protected with insurance as compared to conventional rental deposit while tenants who passed proprietary credit checking process can rent with zero deposit.

The platform functions as a free-to-use classified site that allows peer-to-peer matching between landlords and tenants. Tenants will be charged RM399 for tenancy agreement to transact via Zero Deposit while Landlord will choose to purchase an insurance policy to get better protection.

Once the tenancy is concluded, the company assists landlords to collect the rental from tenants, handling eviction process and resolving disputes regards to tenancy via SPEEDMANAGE. For non-SPEEDHOME users, landlords can register for free in SPEEDMANAGE to automate the rental collection process from their existing tenants.

Although the company transact less than 5% of the volume outside of Klang Valley, this indicates that the business is scalable to transact anywhere in the world without physical presence. This is due to the marketplace model to act as middleman between landlord and tenant.

PROBLEM

For Tenants:

Unaffordable Deposit: Tenants who’s in their mid-20s and mid-30s are low in savings which makes it unaffordable for them to pay an upfront tenancy deposit which amounted to 3-months of the monthly rent. Assuming the average rental is RM1,500, the deposit will be amounted to RM4,500.

Ineffective Matching via middleman: Classified sites which are dominated by middleman are often posting duplicated postings while tenants are unable to deal directly with landlords for negotiation. Tenants are often frustrated with the fraudulent postings which they do not get what they see as per the photos provided due to the middleman relying on these lead generation tactics for co-broking with other middlemen. The multi-layer of communication is causing delay in concluding the transaction as opposed to a direct dealing between landlord and tenant.

For Landlords:

Inferior protection: Landlords who typically rely on 3-months worth of deposit to safeguard against the risk of malicious damage by the tenants are proven to be inferior as often the damage could be more than the deposit.

Unvetted Paymaster: Landlords or agents typically do not perform credit checking on the tenant to understand the loan repayment record of the tenant. The conventional filtration process was biased according to job and employer while the landlord was unable to find out if the tenant is a good paymaster. Majority of the transactions are done by communication via agents while landlords do not understand the tenant’s profile or be part of the communication.

Tedious post-tenancy administrative task: Majority of the agents do not assist the landlord to collect rent or resolve any dispute between the landlord and tenant such as house maintenance. Majority of the landlords will have to be hands-on for handling tenancy issues and rental collection.
 

SOLUTION

End-to-end: The company operates a free-to-post platform www.speedhome.com and mobile app to allow tenants and landlords to deal directly. Homerunners services are provided for free by a ground team deployed to conduct key collection from landlords and show the house to the prospective tenants. Landlord and tenant complete the tenancy process by login in http://speedmanage.com/ draft and sign the tenancy agreement digitally. Upon tenancy is concluded, SPEEDHOME assist the rental collection, eviction and dispute resolution for the landlords.

Zero Deposit: Collecting “2+1” rental deposits was the common practice required by landlords but the young generation or young families who are generally low in bank savings were struggling to rent immediately. Zero Deposit allows qualified tenants to move in with just one month's rent which saves up to 75% of cash outflow. This is only possible due to the superior insurance protection provided to the landlord.

Credit Checking: SPEEDHOME is the only rental platform which has 3-years of proprietary data to operate the machine-learning powered credit checking process for better screening process. Since the deployment, the platform managed to record a 50% reduction in rental default.

Insurance Protection: SPEEDHOME had assisted landlords to claim more than RM800,000 worth of insurance compensation due to malicious damage and default rental payment by the tenant. More than 15% of our customers purchased more than 1 insurance policy with SPEEDHOME and this indicates that landlords believe the insurance is far more superior in protection than conventional tenancy deposits.

Rental Collection: SPEEDHOME assists landlords to collect rental from tenants via FPX, Online Banking, Credit Card or direct bank-in. SPEEDHOME processes the payments next business day to landlords without charging any fee. SPEEDHOME will call tenants on rent overdue and evict tenants via the homerunners team.

TRACTION

	2018	2019	Q1 2020	All Time
Registered Users Added	64,288	101,328	26,303	284,557
Property Listings Added	33,548	36,456	7,308	116,781
Enquires Submitted	143,467	228,888	60,891	514,344
Insurance Policy Sold	832	1,608	733	3,501
Gross Rental Value Transacted (RM)	13,682,172	26,389,680	12,749,243	58,373,351
Gross Rental Value Transacted (USD)	3,165,777	6,106,037	2,949,916	13,506,409

 

Expenses have been maintained at RM1.5 million per quarter throughout the last 5 quarters while Q1 2020’s revenue is almost half of FY2019’s revenue. This also resulted in a 55% reduction in losses. Our business requires a significant investment in user acquisition activities, advertising and promotion and we aim to scale down the advertising in respective cities once we capture significant brand equity and market share. The current financial situation has proven that the company does not need to increase significant expenses to achieve additional revenue. The company will plan to maintain a loss position in the next 4-5 years but will scale down advertising to achieve breakeven 6-months ahead of IPO.

CUSTOMERS

Our paying customers are property owners and tenants. Property owners in general own 2-3 properties while only a limited 5% own more than 5 properties. More than 15% of our property owners purchased more than 1 insurance policy which resulted from renewal of tenancy or transacting their subsequent properties. Most of the tenants are in their mid 20s-30s with young families while 90% are local tenants. Currently, the majority of the property owners and tenants are individuals instead of companies / group.

BUSINESS MODEL

When a tenancy is concluded, the tenant will be charged a one-off RM399 tenancy agreement fee while SPEEDHOME earns an insurance commission from the insurer upon the landlord selecting an insurance product via the platform. The average revenue per tenancy is RM959 while the average transacted rental rate is RM1,400.

 Upon renewal of the tenancy, the tenant will be charged a renewal agreement fee of RM199 while the landlord may renew the insurance for the new term. Currently SPEEDHOME has 2,553 landlords purchased at least 1 tenancy insurance via the platform. Among the pool, there’s 648 landlords or representing 25% of the pool who made repeat purchases while 7% of the pool bought more than 3 times. This indicates that that platform is able to generate repeat business with recurring revenue.

MARKET

 

Klang Valley is projected to be housing 10 million population which suggest to require 2.5 million houses for each household on the basis that 4 people per household. Khazanah Research Institute shared that the house ownership ratio for Klang Valley is at 50% ratio which means half of the households in Klang Valley are living in rented premises. This indicates that Klang Valley rental market is as big as 1.25 million rental property or representing RM1.75 billion in rental transaction fee  on the basis of average rental RM1,400 (USD324).

Across the Asia Pacific cities such as Jakarta, Bangkok, Singapore, Manila, Sydney, Melbourne, Hong Kong, Taipei, Ho Chi Minh and Hanoi are facing supply overhang in the property market while house ownership is low in the capital city. The mentioned cities are suitable for market expansion for SPEEDHOME. The 11 cities are demanding 7 million houses for rental with the assumption of average 4 people per household while 20% of the households are renting in the mid-range rental properties. The collective recurring revenue opportunity is at least USD 2 Billion with the calculation of USD285 as monthly average rental rate multiplied with 7 million houses.

COMPETITION

SPEEDHOME competes in the market of which players are providing service or channel for property owners to obtain recurring income. Classified portal such as Airbnb, iProperty, Mudah, PropertyGuru, Carousell, Facebook Marketplace, Landplus, iBilik function as a lead generation tool for property agents and property owners.

The classified portals do not charge fee based on success basis like SPEEDHOME. OhMyHome offers a mixture of property agency service and transactional services including legal but do not offer the insurance and rental collection.

HomePage and BlueDuck are offering insurance protection but their transaction platform do not have the functional chat function and on-ground service like our homerunners.

Oyo will soon to be an indirect competitor as one of their shareholders – Airbnb has launched a long term rental model recently due to COVID-19 and we foresee that Oyo will make a similar offering to cater for long term rent. However, Oyo's main target market will still be traveller market.

Property agents are deemed as our main competitor to compete our wide range of offering but it will be a hurdle for property agents to work closely with insurer to conduct a proper risk management such as tenant screening.

VISION

2020 is the year of scaling the user acquisition and improving the revenue conversion. The company aims to replicate the model and operate the same in Jakarta and Bangkok by the First Half of 2021.

Securing property listings as supplies is crucial for capturing high volume of transactions. SPEEDMANAGE will be heavily marketed among the landlord community as a free-to-use automated rental collection system for the company to have visibility in which property is vacating soon. SPEEDMANAGE will prompt landlords for posting the property listing on SPEEDHOME platform for seeking replacement tenants once the existing tenant is not paying the rent or the tenancy is not being renewed by the existing tenant. To enhance the value proposition, SPEEDMANAGE will be acquiring a small batch of handyman services to allow tenants and landlords to directly manage the property maintenance on the platform while allowing both parties to opt-in offset of repair fees directly into the rental invoices. The company does not intend to compete the handyman services with the well-known handyman marketplaces but merely provides an integrated dashboard for landlords to track the overall repair fees while tenants are able to track the progress of whether a handyman is being assigned. On the next phase of SPEEDMANAGE, landlords are able to pay a monthly subscription fee for fixing unlimited repairs in the rental property which the labour fees are waived while material fees are charged separately. The basic monthly maintenance fee will include one-time aircond service, one-time spring cleaning and 30 hours worth of labour hours while we launch a higher pricing tier to cater for more types of services.

During the property development boom between 2010-2018, there are a lot of unfurnished units which are vacant and unable to secure tenants to rent which causes a mismatch of offering. Property investors are unable to sell the property due to weak market demand while lack of cash to furnish the unit for rental purposes. The company aims to introduce SPEEDRENO for a furniture subscription business model assisting property investors to pay as low as RM500 a month to furnish the house with movable furnitures. SPEEDRENO will work with OEM furniture manufacturers to source furnitures directly which eliminates the high distribution margin that is known to be marked up between 50-100% on top of factory price. SPEEDRENO aims to earn only 10% margin on top of the factory price. On the other hand, SPEEDRENO subscribers will be signing a 5-years rental assignment exclusivity agreement with SPEEDHOME to manage the fulfillment of tenants and rental collection activities. This allows SPEEDHOME to secure more property owner leads via SPEEDRENO’s transactions.

SPEEDRENO will launch a house defective management app as a free-to-use tool for property developers and new house owners to submit, manage and track the house defects upon vacant possession. This will allows SPEEDRENO promptly upsell the furnished package to potential landlords then list the property on SPEEDHOME upon know the house defective is completed. In the future phase of SPEEDRENO, we will launch a premium package to target for-own-stay house owners which starts at RM1,000 as monthly subscription fee that allows a mark-up margin of 50%.

The company plans to monetise for-sales transactions via commission or referral fee from stakeholders such as banks (mortgage loan), insurer (mortgage or home insurance), property agents (front-end and back-end processing service), lawyers (legal document processing) and property developer (marketing service).

SPEEDHOME aims to be the centralized for-sales transaction platform for property buyers, property investors, property agents and property developers. The company is currently in talks with a few property agency alliances to leverage SPEEDHOME's platform to transact property sales. Property agents will share the commission with SPEEDHOME while SPEEDHOME will provide homerunners service for home viewing, booking collection system, lead filtration service and customer service for first layer interaction on behalf of property agents.

FUNDING UTILISATION

RM7.5 million funding will be allocated as per following:

- 60% Advertising & Promotion

- 20% Research & Development

- 20% Working Capital for regional expansion

INVESTOR

New investors will be investing along with San Francisco-based global venture capital firm 500 Startups whose notable investments in the portfolio include Grab, Twilio, Canva, Udemy, Bukapalak, SendGrid. As of to-date, 500 Startups had backed a total of 16 Unicorn globally while 3 of the portfolio had become a publicly traded company.

Malaysia public-listed conglomerate IJM Corporation Berhad’s wholly owned subsidiary IJM RE Sdn Bhd had invested in the company to foster the ecosystem with their sister company - IJM Land Berhad who’s one of the top property developers in Malaysia. With a Gross Development Value (GDV) in excess of RM30bil, IJM Land Berhad maximises their portfolio of undeveloped landbank of 4,000 acres, which spans across key growth areas in Malaysia (Penang, Pahang, the Greater Kuala Lumpur, Seremban, Johor, Sabah and Sarawak), and as far reaching as Vietnam, China and the United Kingdom.

The company had received RM2 million venture loan from Malaysia Debt Ventures Berhad, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Minister of Finance Inc. On the other hand, Cradle Fund Sdn Bhd (Cradle) an agency under the Ministry of Finance had awarded a RM300,000 grant to the company.

During 2016, the company had received angel investment funding from Fave’s co-founders Joel Neoh and Yeow Chen Chow. Joel Neoh is listed as one of Asia's Top 10 young entrepreneurs. In 2012 Joel won the Ernst & Young Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year. Joeh has built and exited 2 tech companies. Chen Chow worked along with Joel to acquire 3 of Groupon USA’s subsidiaries in South East Asia and formed Fave Group.

Lastly, the company had received investment from 214 individuals from private and public crowdfunding whom many were paying customers of SPEEDHOME.

INVESTMENT HIGHLIGHTS

1. Mutually Exclusive Partnership with Allianz Malaysia

Allianz Group was named the No. 1 insurer on the 2019 Interbrand Best Global Brand while Allianz Malaysia is one of the top insurers in Malaysia. Since 2017, the company has been working very closely with Allianz Malaysia to provide mutually exclusive and comprehensive insurance coverage for SPEEDHOME’s landlords. Besides Malaysia, Allianz Group has insurance operations in Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam. This could potentially set a favourable path for the company to venture into the above mentioned countries for expansion.

2. Widening Distribution Channel

Historically, the company only has a single source of distribution channel which is SPEEDHOME’s platform. The company aimed to drastically increase the landlord user base via referral programme, SPEEDMANAGE and SPEEDRENO.

3. Defensible, Knowhow Driven, Automation Proven to a Scalable Operation

With the knowledge built in overseeing 2000 of houses, SPEEDHOME has accumulated tremendous data, insights and knowhow to streamline the entire process that is hard to replicate. That is our secret sauce in technology that it takes time and experience to learn, which is very defensible against new competitors. 

The company had invested at least RM1 million (USD230k) in proprietary software automation to automate many tasks for sales, marketing and operations. This empowers our current small team of 5 to perform rental collection for 2,000 to 4,000 active tenancy. With the continuous investment and improvement in automation, The company will be able to scale the expansion with much lower headcount while automation takes place.

PRESS COVERAGE

• The Edge: https://www.theedgemarkets.com/article/speedhome-landlords-approve-rental-relief-tenants
• The Malaysian Reserve: https://themalaysianreserve.com/2019/12/05/allianz-pays-out-rm800000-in-claims-to-speedhome-landlords/
• Free Malaysia Today: https://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/nation/2019/08/31/a-rental-app-that-claims-it-can-curb-racism/
• Malay Mail: https://www.malaymail.com/news/malaysia/2019/06/03/minister-hopes-rental-property-platform-will-help-b40-move-to-home-ownershi/1758914
• Digital News Asia: https://www.digitalnewsasia.com/business/digital-technology-keeps-property-and-insurance-players-their-feet
• New Straits Times: https://www.nst.com.my/business/2019/12/544779/new-law-residential-tenancy-be-enacted-two-years-rehda
• The Sun Daily: https://www.thesundaily.my/business/almost-30-gap-in-rental-expectations-EK840868
• Berita Harian: https://www.bharian.com.my/bisnes/lain-lain/2019/06/571043/speedhome-sasar-senarai-rumah-sewa-cecah-40000
• Sin Chew Daily: https://www.sinchew.com.my/content/content_2111448.html
• The Malaysian Reserve: https://themalaysianreserve.com/2018/12/10/no-home-renting-hassles-with-speedrent/
• Sin Chew Daily: https://www.sinchew.com.my/content/content_2061625.html
• Oriental Daily: https://www.orientaldaily.com.my/index.php/news/central/2020/01/30/324520
• The Edge Markets: https://www.theedgemarkets.com/article/rental-market-klang-valley-growing
• Sin Chew Daily: https://www.sinchew.com.my/content/content_2055320.html
• Harian Metro: https://www.hmetro.com.my/bisnes/2020/04/568864/tawar-sewa-percuma-2-bulan
• Malay Mail: https://www.malaymail.com/news/malaysia/2019/06/03/minister-hopes-rental-property-platform-will-help-b40-move-to-home-ownershi/1758914
• Malay Mail: https://www.malaymail.com/news/malaysia/2020/03/25/speedhome-offers-one-month-free-stay-for-covid-19-medical-frontliners-in-kl/1850209

TEAM & ADVISERS

Whei Meng

Whei Meng is the CEO/Founder of Speedhome. He is an undergraduate in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Sunderland. He founded 3 tech businesses during his education period and upon graduation successfully exited those businesses. His last Content Delivery Network (CDN) service was acquired by British company OnApp after which he worked as the Vice President of CDN for OnApp between 2011 and 2018. He currently works full time on SPEEDHOME. Whei Meng is also the patent holder which was awarded by the US Patent & Trademark Office.

 

---