Agent Owned Portal Challenges UK Leaders
October 29, 2009 by Alice Allan
“Stop feeding the hand that bites you” is the message to UK agents from a new portal aimed at taking on market leader rightmove.co.uk and other established subscription based portals.
A holding page for radarhomes.co.uk explains the new portal will be agent owned, allowing members to hold a share in the portal and giving them “protection over future price increases from national portals”.
radarhomes.co.uk explains that it will initially focus on the South West region and ask a £100 one-off share purchase payment along with a £45 monthly subscription fee per branch before 1 January 2010. After that, the cost will rise to £200 for the share plus £75 per month. These fees allow unlimited property uploads.
“Our policy will be to limit future increases in subscription charges by a maximum of inflation plus 5 percent in any one year,” the portal states.
radarhomes.co.uk is offering uploads of entire property registers via existing feeds, single data entry and search engine optimisation to maximise visits. Future plans include the addition of an online newspaper, a recruitment section, and information on life in the South West region.
The creators of radarhomes.co.uk are agents Mark Flynn, Jonathan Williams and Julian Partridge. estateagenttoday.co.uk spoke to Flynn, who said:
“The listings that agents have are of great value, in both content and volume. It is the agents that provide the content that enriches property portals, but agents are then in turn charged for the privilege of doing so, with no future financial reward coming back to them.
Agents need to start realising how powerful they can be when they start working together for the mutual benefit of each other. By doing so, agents will gradually start to take back control of their own destiny when it come to the future of their Internet marketing.”
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This makes perfect sense in theory and a good business model on paper. But agents do not act in the interests of the market or their long term future as a group, they act in the interests of selling an extra house this week.
My example of this is the agents advertising on mixed FSBO/ EA portals like Tepilo where they are helping an essentially FSBO site build a critical mass of properties whilst undermining their own place in the market.
All the best to the radarhomes team with their launch.
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The NAEA launched propertylive.co.uk over 12 months ago, this is free as part of membership subscription. The only thing lacking is traffic, it has everything else in terms of content..needs to be taken to market to get traffic in turn can compete against Rightmove
[...] of value, or as a new UK industry owned real estate website put it so well last week “Stop feeding the hand that bites you“! – how they would wish they had a leading industry owned [...]