PropNex Limited (SGX:OYY) shareholders will have a reason to smile today, with the analysts making substantial upgrades to this year's statutory forecasts. The consensus statutory numbers for both revenue and earnings per share (EPS) increased, with their view clearly much more bullish on the company's business prospects. Investor sentiment seems to be improving too, with the share price up 10.0% to S$1.54 over the past 7 days. Whether the upgrade is enough to drive the stock price higher is yet to be seen, however.

Following the latest upgrade, the current consensus, from the five analysts covering PropNex, is for revenues of S$854m in 2022, which would reflect a chunky 12% reduction in PropNex's sales over the past 12 months. Statutory earnings per share are anticipated to shrink 8.5% to S$0.15 in the same period. Previously, the analysts had been modelling revenues of S$768m and earnings per share (EPS) of S$0.13 in 2022. So we can see there's been a pretty clear increase in analyst sentiment in recent times, with both revenues and earnings per share receiving a decent lift in the latest estimates.

View our latest analysis for PropNex

Despite these upgrades, the analysts have not made any major changes to their price target of S$1.83, suggesting that the higher estimates are not likely to have a long term impact on what the stock is worth. Fixating on a single price target can be unwise though, since the consensus target is effectively the average of analyst price targets. As a result, some investors like to look at the range of estimates to see if there are any diverging opinions on the company's valuation. There are some variant perceptions on PropNex, with the most bullish analyst valuing it at S$1.95 and the most bearish at S$1.61 per share. Even so, with a relatively close grouping of estimates, it looks like the analysts are quite confident in their valuations, suggesting PropNex is an easy business to forecast or the underlying assumptions are obvious.

These estimates are interesting, but it can be useful to paint some more broad strokes when seeing how forecasts compare, both to the PropNex's past performance and to peers in the same industry. These estimates imply that sales are expected to slow, with a forecast annualised revenue decline of 12% by the end of 2022. This indicates a significant reduction from annual growth of 25% over the last five years. Compare this with our data, which suggests that other companies in the same industry are, in aggregate, expected to see their revenue grow 3.7% per year. It's pretty clear that PropNex's revenues are expected to perform substantially worse than the wider industry.