What Is Value, and Who Gets to Decide the Price

Price is not value. That sentence sounds obvious until you have to set a number, and then it becomes the hardest problem in the business.

Here is the tension I keep running into with PropMall. Some people look at what we offer and see real benefit — enough that they would pay RM988 without blinking. Other people look at the exact same thing and see nothing. To them RM365, the price today, is expensive. Same product. Same features. Opposite conclusions.

That gap is not a bug in the market. It is the market.

Value is not one number

There are two kinds of value hiding under the same word.

There is intrinsic value — what the thing actually does. The listings, the reach, the tools, the time it saves an agent, the deals it helps close.

And there is extrinsic value — what a person perceives it to be worth, shaped by their situation, their alternatives, and how they see themselves.

Price sits on top of both. But the mistake is assuming intrinsic value produces one correct price. It doesn’t, because the extrinsic part is different for every buyer.

Valuable for A does not automatically mean valuable for B. An agent closing high-ticket deals recovers RM988 on a single transaction and considers it cheap. An agent who is still figuring out whether property is even their path sees RM365 as a gamble. Both are being completely rational. They are just valuing different things.

So how do I set the price?

This is the real question, and it has a lot of tempting wrong answers:

• By majority? The majority is often the least serious buyer. Pricing for the person least willing to pay is how you end up with a product nobody respects.
• By vote? Nobody votes to pay more. That is not data, that is a wish.
• By what I think it’s worth? My opinion is not evidence. I am the most biased person in this conversation.
• By comparison? Closer — but only if the comparison is honest.

Comparison is where it gets interesting. PropertyGuru Group has more than 18,500 paid users in Malaysia, and their minimum package starts at RM4,000 per year. That is a market that has already voted with its wallet — the strongest signal there is. Thousands of professionals have decided that this category is worth thousands of ringgit annually.

Against that anchor, RM365 is not expensive. It is a rounding error.

So the people who call RM365 expensive are not really telling me about the price. They are telling me they are not the customer. And that is useful information, not a problem to solve.

The question underneath the pricing question

The pricing decision is downstream of a positioning decision. Who is PropMall for?

If it is for the serious agent who treats listings as a business cost — the same person paying RM4,000 elsewhere — then RM365 is almost too cheap, and the objection from casual users is noise I should ignore. If it is for the widest possible audience, then price low, expect low commitment, and win on volume.

I can’t optimise a price until I’ve answered that. The number is easy once the customer is clear. Right now the honest answer is that I am still deciding who I am building for — and until I do, every pricing debate is really a positioning debate in disguise.

What I am fairly sure of: I should stop treating “it’s expensive” from the wrong buyer as feedback, and start treating “18,500 people pay RM4,000” as data.