Rukamen's Ambition to Become the Number One Apartment Search Portal in Indonesia

For Kristian Bunjamin and Pauliady Widjaja, the existing services have not made it easy to search for properties, especially apartments. That's why finally Kristian and Pauliady founded Rukamen which is trying to become the main portal that provides information about apartments more simply and easily.

Pauliady Widjaja, who also acts as Business Development Director, revealed his experience of having difficulty getting apartment information.

“I know what kind of building I want me to live in, but I can't filter (search) results based solely on that building,” say Pauliady.

He also explained that his party believes that apartment searches should be treated differently from other types of property searches. With such an approach, Rukamen is finally presented to simplify the search method specifically for apartments.

Rukamen, as stated on his official website, looks confident with the advantages of easy apartment search based on location and building details. Rukamen also claims to be the first apartment search portal that offers instant payments using a credit card with payment provided by Veritrans.

Rukamen also firmly believes that apartments are the type of future residence for residents in Indonesia. According to Rukamen's internal data, the apartment business in Indonesia is growing rapidly in the past five years.

"(Currently) Rukamen noted that there are 450 apartment profiles throughout Indonesia. Of them, 100-150 new buildings have been completed, are being built, or are in the planning stage," said Pauliady.

He added that this is also a picture of the fast growth in this industry. Despite seeing the slowing down of the Indonesian economy as indicated by the depreciating Rupiah exchange rate against the US Dollar, Pauliady remains optimistic and believes that this situation will improve in the near future.

Future plan

Based in Jakarta, Rukamen currently only consists of three full-time employees and four part-time employees. In the next semester, Pauliady said that his party wants to focus on increasing their user base and improving their site.

"In the next six months, finding investors is not really a top priority for us. We are more concerned with the growth of the user base and the content of the site," said Pauliady.

He further said that they have ambitions to become the number one apartment search portal in Indonesia. All of that is measured through traffic, the number of existing listings and the user experience that users can get. To achieve that, they approach through the application mobile devices.

"Indonesia has one of the largest numbers of mobile phone users in the world, and we cannot ignore that potential," said Pauliady.

"However, we also realize that only a small number of people in Indonesia search for their property via mobile phones. We hope to change that as we saw in Zigbang Korea," he concluded.