Quek Wee Siong chats with us about what to expect in the upcoming REHDA CEO SERIES and Housing Conference 2019.
Written by Felicia Soon
Info compiled and edited by Gunaprasath Bupalan (YouTube – Emjay Communications, The Malaysia Global Business Forum, News Hub Asia, Property360Digest)
Quek Wee Siong graduated from University of Nottingham, Malaysia Campus. His background is in chemical engineering. That was his major in university.
Quek is one of the founders of MHUB. He started the company in 2015 along with three other partners who saw the difficulties that home buyers were facing in the market such as getting their loans approved to which bank to apply to and also where to get the information.
“I had this issue when I booked my first property; one of the residential units in Kuala Lumpur that I book in 2013 or 2014. It took me months to get the loan application done by the first bank that was recommended by the developers. Hence, I asked a friend of mine, who used to work in a bank to introduce me to his colleague and it only took one week for my whole loan to be processed. I find out that if I do not know this friend then I would be getting the yield from the unit that I invested in. This experience stimulated me to venture into proptech with a bunch of my other colleagues to resolve this issue,” says Quek.
How does the MHUB business model work?
MHUB uses a property transaction business model. We help to streamline the processes from the start where the developers or agents get leads and follow up with making a booking.
Back then developers have been using pen and paper to capture the bookings and update the sales charts using stickers up till the loan application, contract signing and sales and purchase agreement.
“When I dealt with all this, I felt that it was too much time wasted in understanding the entire home buying process. That is the reason behind why we decided to build an app to help developers to streamline the process of capturing the booking, understanding the customer loan eligibility behaviour up to digitising the entire contract signing,” shares Quek. He adds that the team has grown from four of us to 35 and are still growing to date.
Strategic event partner of REHDA CEO SERIES and Housing Conference 2019
MHUB were one of the earliest sponsors to the first CEO series and even last year we were one of the main sponsors to REHDA CEO Series and also housing conference.
“Since day one, we always wanted to be part of REHDA Institute’s ecosystem because the members of REHDA are our direct customers so they are the direct benefices of what we have developed and what we intend to build. We want to be the transaction player in the market to help property developers to streamline the whole process.
As the strategic partner of REHDA CEO SERIES and Housing Conference 2019, it will help to open more venues for us to market our products to the right crowd with the right message to the parties involved or perform the decision making for all the property developers companies in the South East Asia (SEA) levels and inform the Head of Departments (HODs) that there is an uprising of proptech players in the market called MHUB who are here to help you and be your technology partner to reduce all your operating cost to streamline the processes as well as to reduce the turnaround time for every booking,” explains Quek.
He adds that REHDA CEO SERIES and Housing Conference 2019 is one of the most important and prestigious events to be organised by REHDA Institute. This conference will give an outlook of what to expect in 2020 and what is the government direction in 2020 as there will be a lot of sharing on insights by the industry players not just domestic but also from international speakers and players who will talk about what is happening regionally the opportunities available in other regions. 
There will also be a slot talking about property technology i.e. big data, artificial intelligence and how the uprising of property technology can help property developers to improve their internal processes as well as to achieve higher sales revenue.
How can we make the best use of big data and analytical tools to understand the property market?
According to Quek, the industrial landscape is moving towards Industrial 4.0. are people are always talking about the Internet of Things (IOT).
“However, before you make use of big data and analytic tools, you need to connect all the data points. There is a trend to connect the hard wares and soft wares to the servers before applying the big data analytic tools to help stakeholders, property developers, property buyers and property agents to make informed decisions and also to leverage data to predict on where we should invest, why the property should be priced at this and so on,” says Quek.
As to how artificial intelligence is changing the landscape of the property industry, Quek reinstated that we should first and foremost study the consumer behaviour before applying artificial intelligence into property management and also property matchmaking transaction.
“Moving forward, I believe there will be a trend where we will see more super agents. Maybe one agent can only manage 100 properties but with artificial technology, they can handle 1000. This is because artificial intelligence will move things faster and you can automate how you do lead management, response to any lead inquiries coming into your portal. There are a lot of artificial intelligence boards out there who are currently doing the automated response inquiry.
All these features can be done automatically and agents just need to handle the inquiry when they reach the very last stage where human interaction is required to do the final closing,” says Quek.
Last but not least, Quek states that the REHDA CEO SERIES and Housing Conference 2019 is a good place to gather information and valuable insights and he hopes that these suggestions and comments by the industry experts will be forwarded to the respective authorities for policy planning and implementation in the years to come.
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