PropertyGuru speeds time to integrate new sources from months to hours

Key results:

• Accelerated time to insights to as little as one hour when it comes to streamed data
• Saved 4-6 months to build new connectors from scratch
• Freed up two data engineers to focus on higher-value projects rather than building and maintaining data pipelines 
• Built 15 business-critical dashboards for various lines of business and leadership 

PropertyGuru Data stack: 

• Pipeline: Fivetran
• Data sources: 10+, including MySQL, Salesforce, SQL, Postgres
• Destination: BigQuery
• BI tool: Looker

Founded in 2007, PropertyGuru Group is Southeast Asia's leading property technology company. With more than 2.8 million monthly real estate listings and 37 million monthly property seekers, PropertyGuru plays a vital role empowering both property seekers and real estate agents to easily connect through listings and efficient search. 

As the company grew to own 82 percent of market share in Singapore and expanded its leadership in other Southeast Asian markets — it faced bottlenecks that required a robust solution to manage its data pipelines efficiently. 

Brittle pipelines led to lost time and wasted resources 

For a multinational and highly-detailed platform like PropertyGuru, the use of data is integral. The company relied on in-house open-source technology for data pipelining, which proved experimental at best and extremely resource-intensive. These challenges included building and maintaining data pipelines, which demanded continuous monitoring and substantial engineering resources for upkeep.

PropertyGuru previously experienced data outages on a frequent basis due to the unreliability of their former connectors. Due to the open-source nature of those connectors, they couldn’t outsource their troubleshooting — requiring redirection of their valuable engineering hours on repairs. Their small data team was stretched thin as they struggled to feel confident in SLAs and were continuously distracted from value-generating projects. 

Efficient and effective data access provides accelerated time to insights 

PropertyGuru chose Fivetran as their data movement platform for several reasons. First, Fivetran's pricing model aligned with their infrastructure, making it a cost-effective choice. More importantly, Fivetran’s 400+ fully-managed connectors ensured that moving data from disparate data sources was fast, easy and reliable for their small team. 

Building a new data source connector previously required 4 to 6 months of engineering resources. With Fivetran, new data sources are added in just a few clicks — which is far less time consuming than manually building pipelines. This massively impacted their team, freeing them to focus on building insights and other data products for their consumers and customers. 

The implementation of Fivetran proved to be a seamless transition for PropertyGuru. Within less than a week, they successfully integrated Fivetran into their data infrastructure, allowing them to centralize data into their data warehouse. They were able to control the frequency of data syncs on the dataset level, providing PropertyGuru with the agility they needed.

With data readily available in their warehouse, they harnessed the power of BI tools, particularly Looker, to facilitate reporting and business intelligence. This transformation opened opportunities for PropertyGuru to build data products, serving as the foundation for key offerings.

"Fivetran’s ability to load data from Salesforce Sales Cloud into BigQuery was a huge success for us. We love how easy it is to manage schema changes for the synced records, and the logs are accessible and detailed."
‍- Shariq Raza, MarTech Product Manager, PropertyGuru

Fivetran's impact extended across multiple departments at PropertyGuru, including Data Science, Data Engineering, Data Analytics and Lifecycle Marketing. Fivetran’s guaranteed SLAs reassured their engineering team and management stakeholders. The solution empowered these teams to confidently leverage data more effectively and efficiently — supercharging their ability to build better data products for their customers. 

Fivetran yielded significant benefits for PropertyGuru:

• Resource allocation: Freed up two dedicated engineers from the day-to-day maintenance of data pipelines.
• Sync monitoring: The need for daily monitoring became obsolete as Fivetran generated alerts for any sync issues, leading to minimal maintenance required for security certificate updates.
• Enhanced reporting: More than 15 dashboards available in Looker for various lines of business within the enterprise to build data products for their consumers and customers. 
• Real-time metrics: The hourly data syncs facilitated by Fivetran enabled PropertyGuru to monitor key metrics at an hourly level.

With data readily accessible, PropertyGuru aims to develop products on top of their data, with the ultimate goal of democratizing data across the organization. PropertyGuru's vision is to power communities to live, work and thrive in tomorrow’s cities. As PropertyGuru continues to innovate and expand its offerings, Fivetran remains a reliable partner in their data journey.

Download this IDC report to learn how Fivetran drives millions in financial impact and enables new business initiatives for enterprises.