Predictions 2009 - New Zealand

While 2009 was generally a quiet year in the New Zealand property portal market, there was one notable exception – the exit of the REA Group’s allrealestate.co.nz and the subsequent marketing arrangement between the REA Group and its former competitor, realestate.co.nz. There now two main players in the residential property portal market and 2009 should see some interesting developments with this new market structure.

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India’s Best Real Estate Website: propertywala.com

Indian property portal propertywala.com has been voted the country’s best real estate website in the 2008 Website of the Year Awards.

The awards are run as an annual ‘people’s choice’ poll and were established in 2004 in India by online market research agency MetrixLab in association with Neilsen Online, supported by partners including Mashable.

This year the awards polled over 1.5 million Internet users from India and propertywala.com was chosen from 12 websites that were nominated in the real estate section.

A statement from the winning portal says:

“PropertyWala.com offers the most broad and user friendly property advertising services free of charge for buyers and sellers in India and overseas. PropertyWala.com has been developed over a period of two years by its parent company Efextra eSolutions Pvt Ltd (an IT company) after an extensive exposure working with international real estate portals. The site has been developed from the ground up with ease of use and web standards in mind. Within a period of 8 months of its launch, PropertyWala.com has become top real estate websites in terms of traffic and search rankings.”

See a list of winners in all categories at the Website of the Year Awards website.

Strategies for Tough Times Workshop

In today’s tough business and financial climate, property portals around the world face challenging issues. These can include:

• Where can I cut costs to ride out the financial storm?
• Can I really compete with the market leaders?
• Where do I get my next injection of funding?
• Will the free to list models really work?
• What impact will Google have on portal sites?
• What new products are coming and should portal sites invest in them?

Answering these and other vital questions alone is not easy, so we thought we would hold a workshop to discuss them as a group.  Property Portal Watch has teamed with the folk at Inman News to create Property Portal Watch Connect – a free, one day workshop for the owners and operators of property portals from around the world.

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seloger.com CEO Predicts Slow 2009

Leading French portal seloger.com’s new CEO Roland Tripard has, unsurprisingly, predicted 2009 will be difficult for the real estate industry.

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Luxury Property Portals on the Increase?

In these challenging economic times you’d think property portals would be focussing on the cheap and cheerful, but the luxury end of the market still seems to be expanding.

Most recently the iproperty.com group launched a magazine to accompany its own luxury portal, iluxuryasia.com. iluxuryasia.com was established earlier this year and draws on its contacts in all countries through its sister websites in the iproperty.com group to collect what it claims is the largest database of luxury real estate for sale and rent from key Asian cities.

In the UK there’s old favourite primelocation.com which launched in 2001. The Digital Property Group are actively keeping it separate from their other three portals (findaproperty.com, homesandproperty.co.uk and findanewhome.com) in an attempt to retain the top end of the market. primelocation.com claim to have over 2 million visitors per month use their portal to view 230,000 “prime” properties to buy, and 60,000 “prime” properties to lease, from 4,000 agents.

In October we also reported on the rather quiet launch of propertyfinder.com’s luxury offering propertyfinder.com/premium, which will be going head to head with primelocation.com.

In the US, condogala.com also launched this year and showcases condos and luxury property developments from all corners of the globe.



A recent post from renthusiast suggests that things are hotting up the US. The website of long running New Jersey based magazine uniquehomes.com has been recently redesigned in order to keep attracting affluent home buyers.

It will face competition from luxuryhomes.com and luxuryrealestate.com which both offer wider global representation. There’s also Leading Real Estate Companies of the World’s offering, luxuryportfolio.com, and established player intlistings.com, just to name a few.

privateproperty.co.za Launches Online Auctions

South African property portal privateproperty.co.za has partnered with Africa’s largest online marketplace, bidorbuy.co.za to introduce a real time online auction facility.

The online auction function comes hot on the heels of a new “pay for what they get” pricing structure for sellers.



People interested in buying property by auction need to register with privateproperty.co.za and on bidorbuy.co.za to receive updates on auction properties and take part in the bidding process. It costs nothing to participate in the bidding process unless you hold the winning bid, in which case a non-refundable deposit of R5000 will be charged to the successful bidder once the auction closes.

Commenting on the announcement, Justinus Adriaanse, CEO of Private Property said:

“It made sense to partner with bidorbuy.co.za on this project. We got the two busiest websites in their respective categories working together to offer property buyers and sellers an exciting and secure online forum to transact.”

“In this stressful economic climate, many property owners are finding it difficult to sell their properties. The online auction facility provides a lot more exposure than the property would receive otherwise, attracting more serious buyers to the playing field.”

“In fact, a property has to have either a video tour or a virtual tour of their property added to the listing before we’ll consider it for auction, as we’re striving to ensure that our property bidders have access to the best quality information possible before they start bidding. We also get the property owners to have their properties On Show before the auction begins, giving potential buyers an opportunity to visit the property before they decide to bid on it.”

privateproperty.co.za began in a garage in 1998, but has grown to become South Africa’s busiest property website with over 200,000 registered buyers and more than 5 million page impressions a month.

immobilienscout24.de Price Increase

German market leader immobilienscout24.de have announced a price increase.

The portal argues that the increase will enable them to provide a better service, and that it will enhance their ability to attract buyers for their agents.

The increase comes at a time when many portals are reconsidering price structures, as agents struggle in a difficult market. UK market leader rightmove.co.uk has already suggested it will not be increasing pricing for 2009.

immobilienscout24.de is owned by Deutsche Telekom and is part of the telco’s Scout Group which also operates portals in the other major classifieds categories. It is the clear market leader in Germany.

One blog puts the price increase at around 1 euro per item.

Along with new packages and prices for immobilienscout24.de comes a new booking facility called FLEXplus.

With trends indicating immobilienscout24.de typically takes the lead in setting prices, it raises speculation that this could set a precedent for other German portals to hike up their prices.

The new price list for immobilienscout24.de can be viewed here.

Read our overview of the German portal market here.

Google Street View Arrives in NZ

This week the Google Street View function went live in New Zealand.

First on the Street View bandwagon were property portal market leader trademe.co.nz and number two player realestate.co.nz, plus nz.open2view.com who all introduced the application on Tuesday, the day the application launched.

House hunters can now use the application to visualise the street and surroundings. It provides a street by street view of the whole country, available with a 360° horizontal and 290° vertical panoramic street-level view.

While many have raised privacy concerns about Google Street View, it is an invaluable resource for homehunters, and provides non-photoshopped and more impartial visual information than a real estate agent’s photos might do. For instance, Street View will reveal not only the house for sale or rent, but the neighbours, and the outlook. People caught on Google’s cameras have had their faces blurred to prevent their identity from being revealed.

Until the change this week, trademe.co.nz had previously used SMAPs. SMAPs ran on a back-end created by Wellington company Project X, and a front-end developed by an inhouse trademe.co.nz team.

trademe.co.nz’s head of commercial, Mike O’Donnell , told The National Business Review: “We had a lot of positive feedback about SMAPs from our members, but the fact is that mapping is not our core business and Google‘s better at innovating in this area.”.

O’Donnell also said that despite initial resistance to the function when SMAPs were first introduced 2 and half years ago, uptake had been improving. Useage has risen from only 18% of listings having this feature when SMAPs were first launched, to 51% of listings using Google Street View as of this week.

The Google Street View photos were taken by cameras mounted on cars, which took a year to circle New Zealand covering all areas except Hokitika and Greymouth, where bad weather prevented images from being taken.

Google Street View is already used by other property portals in Australia, the US, France and Japan.

iproperty.com Launch Magazine

The iluxuryasia.com portal was launched earlier in 2008 by the iproperty.com group. The company has a portfolio of successful property websites across Asia, but the latest addition to the iproperty.com group is a new quarterly iluxuryasia.com magazine.

This makes iluxuryasia.com Asia’s first and only integrated regional luxury property media platform incorporating both a website and magazine.

According to news reports, the magazine targets Asian and international investors looking for property in Australia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.

To retain its luxury, exclusive feel, the magazine will begin with a circulation of 25,000 across Asian cities. The company hopes that the glossy will add to the buying process. It will be available at major bookstores and newsstands in the region as well as through some distribution partners and it will be personally delivered to the targeted elite in the region.

In a statement issued by the company, Patrick Grove, executive chairman of the iproperty.com Group said:

“iluxuryasia.com magazine is designed to equip buyers with the know-how to confidently purchase luxury real estate and to make informed investment decisions in a number of Asia-Pacific’s most modern and exciting cities. iluxuryasia.com magazine also features information such as legal and financial tips, and country-specific guides on buying procedures - all customised specifically to the needs of foreign investors.”

“Together, the iLuxuryasia.com website and magazine will work synergistically to provide a greatly enhanced property-hunting experience for investors on the lookout for Asian luxury property. Developers and marketers will also benefit from an exclusive and stylishly integrated marketing platform which reaches out to a highly-focused target group.”

The iproperty.com group owns one of Asia’s leading networks of property portals, which includes iproperty.com.sg and invest.sg in Singapore, iproperty.com.my in Malaysia, iproperty.com.ph in the Philippines, vrhouse.com.tw in Taiwan, india.iproperty.com in India (formerly realacres.com), gohome.com.hk and house18.com in Hong Kong.

Drawing on its contacts in all countries through its sister sites, iluxuryasia.com claims to have the largest database of luxury real estate for sale and rent from key Asian cities.

The company also runs the iproperty.com EXPO, held annually in three Asian locations.

Launching PropertyAdGuru

Property Portal Watch now has a sister site, www.propertyadguru.com. While Property Portal Watch focuses on the owners and operators of property portals, Property Ad Guru is for agents and realtors around the world and provides them with advice and guidance on how to get the most from their online advertising spend.

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