PropertyGuru updates its sustainability report with carbon neutrality

PropertyGuru has released its 2024 Sustainability Report under the banner of its Gurus For Good strategy, reaffirming its commitment to building more inclusive, environmentally conscious, and future-ready cities across Southeast Asia.

Anchored on three key pillars — sustainable living, thriving communities, and responsible business — the strategy sets out to shape urban environments that are not only climate-resilient but also socially inclusive and designed for long-term well-being.

Something old, something

When I covered PropertyGuru’s 2023 Sustainability Report last year, the company had already laid a foundation for greener and more equitable property markets. Revisiting their progress now reveals how far they’ve come, and what’s been newly introduced.

One continuing feature is the Green Score, first launched in 2021. This tool helps property seekers evaluate how eco-friendly a development is by assessing factors such as proximity to public transport and the number of sustainability awards the property has received. Each property is rated on a scale of one to five, offering an intuitive way for users to gauge its environmental performance.

This year, the Green Score gained renewed relevance with findings from a 2024 PropertyGuru survey: 72% of consumers in the region expressed interest in purchasing sustainable homes, and 68% said they would pay a premium for eco-friendly features. For many, sustainable homes offer not just environmental benefits, but long-term cost savings through energy efficiency, along with the personal satisfaction of supporting a meaningful cause.

This trend is also mirrored in Thailand, where 90% of property seekers expressed interest in sustainable housing, and 93% were willing to pay more for it. In response, PropertyGuru has rolled out a Sustainable Living filter on its Thai marketplace, DDproperty.com. This new feature allows users to find properties that include green features such as solar panels and electric vehicle (EV) charging stations.

In addition to the Green Score, PropertyGuru is continuing its partnership with climate risk analytics firm Intensel. Their integrated Climate Risk Assessment tool combines satellite imagery and data modelling with PropertyGuru’s listings to assess exposure to natural disasters like floods and storms, helping property seekers make safer, more informed decisions.

Tackling local problems

Closer to home, PropertyGuru introduced a new initiative, called Everyone Welcome, in both Singapore and Malaysia. The initiative addresses a persistent issue in the rental market — despite the region’s strong emphasis on multiculturalism, unconscious bias and stereotypes still influence rental opportunities, especially in private housing. In fact, one in four individuals in Singapore has experienced racial bias when searching for a rental property.

The Everyone Welcome tag can be added to rental listings by landlords who are open to tenants of all races, genders, religions, and sexual orientations. It aims to create a more inclusive property market by providing a clear signal of inclusivity to property seekers, while encouraging landlords and agents to embrace diversity and inclusive practices. Currently, one in four rental listings on PropertyGuru Singapore carry the Everyone Welcome tag. 

However, some listings may adopt the tag performatively, without truly reflecting inclusive practices. This is an issue that’s difficult to verify, especially since discrimination can be difficult to spot without the ability to compare experiences across different tenants, or the landlord displaying clear, overtly discriminatory behavior.

To address the more obvious aspects of such discriminatory practices, the Group has also enforced comprehensive listing creation guidelines, uses a language moderation tool to detect discriminatory content on its marketplace, and provides seekers with a reporting mechanism to flag discrimination.

In order to tackle the more obvious forms of discrimination, PropertyGuru has updated its listing creation guidelines, employed a language moderation tool for biased content, and provides a reporting mechanism for users to flag discriminatory behavior on its platform. However, it is likely that this initiative will continue to be developed over the next year.

And global concerns

Besides these new technological changes to the company’s property search platform, PropertyGuru has successfully made their operations carbon neutral. 

In last year’s report, I mentioned how 40% of global carbon dioxide emissions are from the real estate industry, 70% of which are produced by building operations; in other words, the energy used to drive everyday living. These emissions are under the wider umbrella of Scope 2 Emissions, which are indirect greenhouse gas emissions from operations like electricity, heat, or cooling.

Over the last year, PropertyGuru pledged to reduce its such Scope 2 emissions, and has managed to achieve net-zero emissions for its direct operations through the purchase of Energy Attribute Certificates.

These certify that a specific amount of energy was produced from renewable sources. By purchasing these certificates, PropertyGuru effectively matched its energy use with renewable energy, offsetting its carbon emissions and enabling it to achieve carbon neutrality for its direct operations. 

This reduces the carbon footprint of the operations side and presents a good foundation for the company to build off on for its decarbonisation efforts.

“The demand for sustainable and inclusive housing is growing, and at PropertyGuru, we’re responding with actionable solutions,” said Cécile Corda, Head of Sustainability, PropertyGuru Group.

“By equipping property seekers and real estate stakeholders with the tools to make informed, sustainable choices, we’re helping to build cities that are not only resilient but grounded in principles of inclusivity, driving meaningful change in the housing market.”