rightmove.co.uk to Takes Private OS Listings
October 30, 2008 by Simon Baker · 1 Comment
In a not so surprising move, Globaledge reported today that rightmove.co.uk will be taking private advertisements from overseas sellers.
Will Ad Revenue Drop for US Property Websites?
October 30, 2008 by Emma Sorensen · Leave a Comment
The results of the half-yearly Internet Advertising Revenue Report, conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP for the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), will be met with some anxiety by property portals and websites.
The good news is that overall Internet advertising revenues are up on last year. But the not so good news is that second quarter 2008 figures are slightly lower than the first quarter of 2008. It’s the first dip in revenue since the third quarter of 2004:
Should Portals be Loyal to Estate Agents?
October 30, 2008 by Emma Sorensen · 5 Comments
upad.co.uk launched in October 2008 and cuts out real estate agents from rentals in the UK.
upad.co.uk, a new lettings website in the UK, is causing a stir, with some real estate agents lobbying big portals to refuse listings from the newcomer.
upad.co.uk launched in October, allegedly in response to research that showed 83 percent of UK Internet users were unhappy with their property search experience (FindsYou.com 2008 research) and 39 percent of renters stating that out-of-date information was been the biggest problem when looking for a new pad (rentright.co.uk 2007 survey).
Landlords pay £29.50 to advertise on upad.co.uk until they find their ideal tenant.
Upsetting to real estate agents is that upad.co.uk removes them from the property equation, or as upad.co.uk put it: “upad matches renters directly to landlords, removing the need for an agent.”
Estate Agent Today has reported on the campaign by Kristjan Byfield, director of Base property specialists in London, to stop portals that upad claimed to have a relationship with from accepting their listings:
“Byfield said these were sites “that have long made a lot of money out of estate agents and continue to do so” and that they should not be marketing properties in direct competition with the letting and estate agency industry.”
The protest is reminiscent of estate agent’s winning objections to Tesco’s property website in 2007.
Although upad.co.uk is only London based, the campaign ties into larger debates over the role of estate agents and property portals.
A reader comment on Inman News this week even suggests that if realtors in the US don’t want to be left out of the home-buying equation they should heed the example of the rapid market-led online changes in the music industry.
Consolidation in the UK Market?
October 30, 2008 by Simon Baker · 1 Comment
The UK property portal market is ripe for consolidtion. The question is who is most likely to merge and what impact could it have?
Interview with Ed Freyfogle - nestoria.co.uk
October 30, 2008 by Emma Sorensen · 6 Comments
nestoria.co.uk is a UK based vertical search engine for property. nestoria.co.uk is owned by Lokku Limited, a privately funded group of entrepreneurs with strong backgrounds in European Internet search. At the helm is co-founder, Ed Freyfogle.
properazzi.com Becomes enormo.com
October 30, 2008 by Emma Sorensen · 2 Comments
This week property search engine properazzi.com announced a name change. It will now be known as enormo.com.
enormo.com CEO, Yannick Laclau, told propertyportalwatch.com that the name change is about communicating better what the company does, to homeseekers and real estate industry professionals:
“Enormo is a terrific name for us because it’s a simple, playful name which invokes the idea of ’size’, and it fits our website, which has steadily grown to become the largest listings database in the world.”
The property blogosphere have been scathing of the name change.
theratandmouse.co.uk referred to enormo as a “porn name” while futureofrealestatemarketing.com said the new name “feels kind of generic, and unrelated to real estate”.
Maybe Joni Mitchell was right, and you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.
Starting from humble beginnings in late 2006, enormo.com now have a team with headquarters in Barcelona, Spain, and are backed by Mangrove Capital Partners, based in Luxembourg.
On his own blog, Laclau says growth has been very strong in recent months and enormo.com now have 6 million properties for sale and rent in more than 50 countries around the world.
Laclau says the site will continue to grow, with some new features planned for release in the next few months.
Petition Against rightmove.co.uk Fails
October 30, 2008 by Emma Sorensen · 3 Comments
An online petition protesting against rightmove.co.uk’s subscription fees has failed to garner any real support from UK real estate agents.
The petition was started by “Ripoffmove” over a week ago, on 23 October, and so far only has a pitiful 7 signatures.
Supporters are being asked to put their name to the following statement:
“We, the undersigned intend to cancel our subscription to rightmove on 5th January 2009 unless the subscription price is, at least, halved.
We are all fed up of paying huge subscription fees in a market climate that we are currently experiencing, to a company that is making redundancies and cutbacks and not passing those savings on to their customers.”
The reason for the low number of signatures could lie in the fact that supporters are requested to “only sign if you genuinely intend to take part in this boycott.”
Despite the widespread rumblings of discontent about rightmove.co.uk’s fee structures, it seems many would rather try other negotiating techniques (read our article UK Agents Stage Assault on Portal Fees).
Gentrify Horrifies the Property World
October 29, 2008 by Emma Sorensen · Leave a Comment
Gentrify: horrifying or amusing?
A new search website, Gentrify, is both horrifying and amusing the property world with its mashup of property search, Google Maps and parody of middle class neighbourhood must-haves.
The homepage loads with the following invitation for property hunters:
“Tired of stepping over homeless people on your way to bikram? Jonesing for a Yacon Root smoothie? Gentrify (San Francisco edition) helps the elite urban bourgeois find their natural habitats.”
With search categories like Yoga, Gluten Free, Psychiatrist, Buddhist Temples, Cannabis Clinics, Acupuncture, Cosmetic Surgeons, Farmers Market, Sushi Bars and Home Décor, it certainly knows its target market well.
Given the amount of blogging about it this week not everyone in the property world has a sense of humour.
As Agent Genius put it, “Terribleness aside, the concept of a city map mashup of this magnitude is very cool”.
Gentrify was created for Rails Rumble ’08.
Real Estate Widgets are Here To Stay
October 29, 2008 by Emma Sorensen · Leave a Comment
TruliaMinistats widget shows the median price change for any US city
Joel Burslem at futureofrealestatemarketing.com declared 2007 the year of the widget, but with trulia.com releasing two new widgets this week, it seems that they are still hanging around.
Trulia.com’s latest free widget releases have evolved from existing applications:
Trulia Snaphot widget – an image and map based way to show property listings.
TruliaMinistats widget – a small and simple widget that shows the median price change, in both absolute dollars and in percentage, for any city in the US.
They join the host of other property widgets such as mortgage calculators, property price or sales graphs, local area info charts, and polls.
TV Ads for primelocation.com, findaproperty.com
October 29, 2008 by Emma Sorensen · Leave a Comment
In July of this year The Digital Property Group, a division of Associated Northcliffe Digital, reaffirmed its “commitment to a multi-brand strategy for its property portals” which include primelocation.com and findaproperty.com as well as homesandproperty.co.uk and findanewhome.com.
Rather than merging any of the portals DPG said it would be even more tightly focussing them on different segments of the market.
As other companies tightened their belts, Mark Milner, CEO of The Digital Property Group, went on to say that in challenging market conditions, The Digital Property Group had made a multi-million pound investment in print and television advertising for both primelocation.com and findaproperty.com. Some estimates place it as high as £17 million.
TV advertisements for both portals have been running in the UK all through the month of October. So why have The Digital Property Group gone down this road?
This week Milner was quoted in Estate Agent Today as saying “television advertising has proven to be very successful in raising consumer brand recognition for our portals.”
Separating the four websites is a consumer-facing idea only. All of the portals in The Digital Property Group are offered to agents as one package through a single sales representative under a value based pricing model.
Milner commented in July that the group will continue to keep the four portals as differentiated brands in the eyes of the consumer but believe that “offering our portals as a single package will enable agents to market their properties to a broad spectrum of the market in a targeted and cost effective way.”
Further justifying this decision, The Digital Property Group wrote: “Each of the four portals has a distinctive brand with segregated target audiences, demonstrated by the fact that only 16% of users search for properties on both the main web sites findaproperty.com and primelocation.com (Source: comScore April 2008)”.
For example, The Digital Property Group say that the findaproperty.com audience is mainly those in early property life stages – renters and first to third time buyers. Whereas primelocation.com apparently attracts an older, more affluent audience centred on later life stages and top end rentals. This is clearly reflected in the two rather different TV advertisements:
The findaproperty.com advertisement (above) clearly markets itself at a younger, less established audience to the primelocation.com advertisement (below).
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