End to end residential rental platform, SPEEDHOME , congratulates the Malaysian Institute of Estate Agents (MIEA) for embracing insurance practices to protect landlords’ interests but hopes that the agency will change its perspective on seeing tech companies as illegal brokers.
Founder of SPEEDHOME, Whei Meng Wong expressed that “I wish to congratulate MIEA for taking a positive step to embrace insurance as a practice to safeguard landlord interest. While I welcome this news as a big advancement for market maturity, I vehemently disagree with MIEA CEO & past president K. Soma Sundram’s statement on tech companies trying to bypass the law.”
He further continued his statement by saying “Mr K. Soma Sundram is viewing the property industry from a very narrow lens that only real estate practitioners are allowed to serve the public. It has undermined the hard work and innovation of tech companies who have created new solutions and value for the market.”
He says that healthy competition is the key to market maturity, thus, having more diverse backgrounds of people and industries looking at the market spurs new ideas to old problems by taking different perspectives.
One example of this is when SPEEDHOME pioneered the concept of Landlord Insurance in the region together with Allianz General Insurance Berhad to offer the best-in-class insurance in the market.
Wong adds, “Real Estate practitioners are entitled to a commission for a property rental transaction as permitted by the law; SPEEDHOME on the other hand is a free-to-use platform with the option to purchase insurance. From a business revenue point of view, insurance agencies are at a disadvantage. Yet, they did not deter SPEEDHOME from serving the market because we passionately believe we are providing value to the market through a different lens.”
The law is clear, SPEEDHOME is a licensed insurance agency and under no circumstances should it be labelled as a real estate agency; hence MIEA must change its habits of calling tech companies that participate in the real estate industry as ‘illegal brokers’.
In fact, more room should be given to tech companies and other players to further accelerate the development of the industry to meet the ever-changing demand from the market.
At the end of his statement, Wong called out to MIEA saying “I urge MIEA to double down effort in combating the players that are truly contravening the law instead of turning down tech companies that are trying to provide innovative solutions towards the market long-existing problems and ever-changing demand.”
