STEVE MELHUISH

Living place: Philippines

Steve Melhuish, 19, is a Co-founder & Director – PropertyGuru.com.
The loans market has been heading upwards for the whole of 2009, with the volume of home loans in 2009 peaking way past the high levels last seen in 2007.

LoanGuru definitely made an excellent strategic move by venturing into the mortgage space, since clearly that’s the next valuable offering they can provide their home-buying users.

In all due fairness, I got in touch with Steve Melhuish, the Director and Co-founder of PropertyGuru, to get his views on the matter as well. Unfortunately, he refused to comment on speculation about mergers and acquisitions.

However, he was quick to add that the decision to develop the LoanGuru business was made two months ago, after a detailed assessment of the mortgage market, while leveraging the experience of generating mortgage leads over the last 18 months.

Well now that LoanGuru has been launched, it’s pretty obvious that the initial partnership/acquisition plans had fallen out. When asked why, Vinod said that they could not come to an agreement on the price and terms, which he personally felt was not within negotiable range.