Vinod Nair, who started property apps HomeSpace and RentSpace, has launched a portal, shorttermrentals.sg, that matches short-term property rentals.

The rather aptly named Short Term Rentals portal is primarily aimed at expats and exchange students in Singapore who are looking for lodging that’s cheaper than a hotel but who are not staying long enough to sign a the typical one year apartment lease. The portal contains listings for condominiums, serviced apartments and rooms.

Catapult Ventures has plenty of experience in the property space. It runs Smartloans, a mortgage comparison platform, that has closed more than SGD30 million in loans and expanded to Malaysia in June.

But Catapult had to pull the plug on its two earlier property sites, HomeSpace and RentSpace, in May. Vinod says he had to shut the sites down because the revenue model wasn’t working.

“It wasn’t being used as much we had hoped, even as a free site, so it didn’t make sense for us to keep it live any longer. I’ve learnt a lot through my experiences with HomeSpace and also with SmartLoans, and have decided to give this whole real estate thing another go,” he said.

One thing Vinod learned from his RentSpace days is the importance of usability.

“The (RentSpace) site made exploring easy but browsing and searching more difficult. Specifying a location was a must, without which users would not be able to really make use of the powerful map features. So it made getting from HomePage to Listing a longer and tedious process,” he said.

With Short Term Rentals, maps are no longer the focus. Catapult built a crisp and clean search and listings page to make browsing and shortlisting entries more convenient.

Vinod’s strategy with Short Term Rentals is to go small. He hopes the site will find a relatively small niche market where it will easier to become the  market leader. He says competing sites like Propertyguru and iProperty, have a short-term rentals matching feature, but it’s buried too deep in the site to give value to users.

Catapult also runs an SMS marketing solution called Textuate besides its property focused sites.