Real Estate Investor Magazine South Africa April/May 2019 | Page 13

JP FARINHA
Property24’s JP
Farinha talks to
REImag
about bad estate agents,
re-inventing business models and the international
disrupter lurking just
around the corner.
KEY STATS
LEANI WESSELS
T
he CEO of Property24 doesn’t look like the Big Bad
Wolf any traditional real estate agent would tell you he
is. At his office in Newlands, Cape Town, the busi-
nessman talked almost reverentially of the property industry
and doing whatever it takes to create an easy, user-friendly ex-
perience for his customers. His open and comfortable nature
reflects something of a philosophy in the digital space – that
information shouldn’t be hoarded, rather, freely offered to an
increasingly sophisticated user.
‘Our timing was incredibly good when we started investing
in Property24, the industry was on the cusp of change because
of digital,’ says Farinha. ‘Private Property had already come in
and was affecting the industry, we just came along after that
and disrupted that business.’ What has happened is estate
agents have realised they need to actively market properties
on the digital side, he says. ‘They understand now that it’s a lot
more complex in the online world – it’s not just Property24,
it’s facebook, it’s Instagram, it’s Twitter that they need to get
their heads around. So the biggest change didn’t come from us,
it came from the internet.’
Near the end of the 80’s Farinha left the army with no idea
of what to do. He completed a course in computers and joined
the Johannesburg Stock Exchange as a programmer. He ran
iAfrica.com when he was noticed by Naspers and headhunted
to work for Mweb. He ran 24.com before he moved into
Age: 49
Married with three children
Lives in: Cape Town
Currently reading: The Choice, Autobiography Edith Eger
Life motto: Above all else be kind
Favourite international conference you've attended:
Property Portal Watch
Guilty consumption pleasure (media related): Netflix original
series
Favourite part of Cape Town: Tamboerskloof
SA business hero: Koos Bekker
Property24 and invested his life savings into a shareholding of
Korbitec, the tech business Property24 merged with in 2010 to
become the property portal almost every South African with
a mouse is aware of. ‘That was probably the best investment I
made from a value creation perspective.’
The Naspers shares he received when he joined the company
(at a tidy R40) didn’t do his portfolio too badly either. He
didn’t sell the shares at their peak in 2017, but at around R3
260, he’s not complaining.
Property24 started in 2000 as part of the Media24 stable but it
looked very different from the major property sales portal it is now.
Back then it made most of its money from mortgage refinancing,
but in 2008 when the property market crashed and banks reduced
exposure to originators, the business started making a loss. ‘We
had to re-look at what Property24’s primary business model
was,’ says Farinha. In the process of developing another business
model, a lot of money was invested in creating Property24 as a
portal, aggregating listings for consumers. ‘At the time there was
a primary competitor in the market, Private Property, they were
quite innovative, they had launched a private listings business
where they wanted to disintermediate the estate agents, but they
realised that the model didn’t really work, there were too few
people who wanted to transact without an estate agent involved.
So they switched their model to allow estate agents to list on their
site. They were probably three to five years ahead of where we
SA Real Estate Investor Magazine APRIL/MAY 2019
11