Property Portal 99.co Leverages Vonage to Secure App Registrations and Increase User Engagement

Despite having a population of just 5.4 million, Singapore is one of the top 10 real estate cities in the world. To help alleviate the pain of finding a suitable property, Singapore’s fastest-growing property portal 99.co provides renters, buyers and property agents with a powerful map-based property search engine to provide a fast and transparent search experience.

To prevent scams that typically occur on classified sites, 99.co needed a reliable user authentication process to verify and match each broker’s identity against an official broker database. A similar authentication process was also needed to verify the phone numbers of new property seeking registrants to make sure agents received high-quality, legitimate leads.

99.co also required a cloud communications partner to enable brokers and potential renters to reliably connect via SMS.

Finding Vonage

Using Vonage’s Verify API, 99.co implemented a user authentication process, whereupon a user enters a unique PIN code when registering on the 99.co mobile app or website. If the new registrant is a broker, the API instantly matches the phone number to an official broker database, thereby verifying the user and granting access to the 99.co services.

If the new registrant is a potential buyer or renter, they simply enter the unique PIN code they receive via SMS to gain access to 99.co property listings. The Vonage SMS API enabled 99.co to provide instant and reliable connectivity between property agents and potential customers via SMS.

The Vonage Verify API and SMS API enabled 99.co to successfully:

• Increase SMS deliverability
• Boost overall user acquisition
• Improve user retention by 15%
• Prevent scam users from registering, thereby increasing legitimacy of users
• Reduce engineering costs
• Reduce overall communications costs by only paying for successful verifications

“Most property seekers and estate agents are extremely mobile-centric, so we knew we needed a communications solution to enable reliable SMS connectivity and a seamless user authentication process,” said Darius Cheung, CEO and Co-Founder of 99.co.

“It was important for 99.co to find a single partner that could provide the breadth of solutions we required, as well as offer local infrastructure to achieve the highest communications delivery. The reliability, stability and quality of the Vonage products and infrastructure have allowed the 99.co community to thrive. We look forward to continuing our partnership as we grow internationally.”