propertylive.co.uk, Backed by NAEA, to Launch in the UK

It has been reported this week that the National Association of Estate Agents in the UK is going to launch a free website in the UK – potentially as soon as September this year.  The site will be called propertylive.co.uk.  The 10,000 or so members of the association will be able to upload all their for sale and for let listings at no charge.

Now this is not the first free site in the UK with zoomf.com, globrix.com, and dothomes.co.uk (to name a few) all promoting agents listings for free.  To date these sites have worked in parallel with the big four – rightmove.co.uk, propertyfinder.com, fIndaproperty.co.uk and primelocation.com.   Agents tend to pay to be on one or more of the big four and then also use some of the others for additional leads.  

However with the economic down turn in the UK, the interest in searching for property online has decreased as can be seen in the decrease in page views to the top 4 sites – especially rightmove.co.uk.  The result is that less page views is likely to mean less leads for advertisers and therefore the paid for sites will find it harder to justify any price increases. 

 

On the other hand, the free sites, such as nestoria.co.uk and globrix.com have experienced good growth in the number of page views that they are generating.  Globrix.com (backed by News International) has made good progress since launch in January 2007.

 

However, to put it all in context, i have compared rightmove.co.uk to globrix.com and nestoria.co.uk, you can see that rightmove.co.uk dominates them both in terms of page views generated for agents.

 

Therefore, even though propertylive.co.uk is being launched and backed by the NAEA, they will have a very long way to go to make a real impact in the UK market.

1. NAEA Launching propertylive.co.uk, What is All the Fuss About?

   There has been a lot of noise this week on the forthcoming launch of propertylive.co.uk by the National Association of Estate Agents in the UK. However, on further analysis, it is unlikely that the site will have any impact on the UK market. Read on find out why....

2. propertylive.co.uk Still Not Live

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3. propertylive.co.uk

   propertylive.co.uk is the free-to-list portal belonging to the National Federation of Property Professionals (NFOPP) in the UK. It launched in beta form in October 2008. ...

4. NFOPP’s propertylive.co.uk Finally Launches

   Earlier this week we told you not to hold your breath, but we can now all relax. propertylive.co.uk is finally, really, truly, live. It seems we underestimated the speed at which the NFOPP could get a website on the scale of propertylive.co.uk up and running. In an interview with Estate Agent Today, Peter Bolton King, chief executive of NFOPP, said technical glitches had caused the site’s delay. Now they’ve been cleared up the team are busy loading onto the portal some 50,000 of the 200,000 properties they have already signed up....

5. propertylive.co.uk Spreads Its Wings

   The much anticipated launch of propertylive.co.uk last year came and went with very little noticeable impact on the UK market. This might be about to change, as the new portal has revealed grand expansion plans. ...