PropertyGuru Group is Southeast Asia’s leading PropTech company, and the preferred destination for over 28 million property seekers every month to find their dream home. PropertyGuru empowers stakeholders in the property ecosystem with in-depth insights, and solutions that enable them to make confident property decisions across Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam. PropertyGuru has continually leveraged their tech capabilities and consumer reach to promote sustainable living choices and influence positive changes for the environment.
PropertyGuru was looking to understand their emissions on a more granular level of detail, in order to identify the most impact opportunities for decarbonisation. Moreover, they were keen to understand their different emissions footprints across countries, and take what was working in one market to others.
The main challenge was the difficulty of taking data from multiple systems and formats, as well as offline sources, and integrating them together into a complete dataset ready for emissions calculations.
PropertyGuru leveraged the Terrascope platform to more efficiently assimilate data across various sources, using AI to identify data quality issues, estimate data gaps and automate the matching of emission factors. This enabled PropertyGuru’s sustainability team to focus their time on analysing the different emissions categories, from Purchased Goods & Services, Employee Commute, Business Travel and Product Usage, to identify their most material hotspots, what was driving them and whether these were the same across markets.
Building an impactful decarbonisation program
PropertyGuru used the advanced simulation capabilities of Terrascope’s Reduce Module, to model and quantify the impact of different decarbonisation levers. These ranged from increasing the share of renewable energy in their energy mix, to retrofitting buildings to reduce energy consumption, or to optimising employee travel policies to reduce long-haul flights.
In collaboration with sustainability experts from Terrascope, the PropertyGuru team created a series of ‘What If’ scenarios, that included multiple dimension of change, from decarbonisation actions by PropertyGuru, to even the impact of country committed Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) on future emissions. By creating and evaluating many scenarios of emissions reductions against potential costs, the company was able to further fine tune its emission reduction strategies.
The Value for PropertyGuru
By partnering with Terrascope, PropertyGuru unlocked value in two distinct ways:
Speed and Operational Efficiency
Terrascope’s data management and AI capabilities helped to speed the process of data collection, ingestion, integration and transformation, enabling the measurement cycle to be completed five times faster than PropertyGuru’s previous efforts. Moreover, combining the time saved with the improved emissions granularity, enabled the company’s sustainability team to unlock the emissions insights and simulations needed to accelerate the internal buy-in for change.
Future Proofing the Business
Terrascope helped PropertyGuru establish a repeatable emissions measurement & reporting process, in preparation of future SEC disclosure requirements from being a US listed company. Moreover, creating visibility into the different emissions intensity of operations across their markets empowered the country teams to take greater ownership of their carbon footprint going forward.