UK Portals Battle for Decreasing Traffic

Internet traffic analyst, comScore has released November figures for the UK. These will be a Christmas present for some, and a source of discontent for others, as the race to claim the overall top spot for 2008 reaches its final stages.

With declining web traffic overall to real estate websites in November, the competition has been heated.

rightmove.co.uk still leads with almost twice the number of unique visitors (1,994,000) as its nearest rival, findaproperty.com (1,069,000) at number two.

Over the last two months findaproperty.com has overtaken propertyfinder.com, who has been relegated to number three (1,030,000).

Controversially, the Digital Property Group, which owns findaproperty.com, as well as findanewhome.com (33rd with 96,000), primelocation.com (4th with 908,000) and homesandproperty.co.uk (8th with 300,000), claims to have closed the gap on rightmove.co.uk.

In November the difference between the number of unique visitors to rightmove.co.uk and the Digital Property Group’s portals was at an all time low of only 211,000. Mark Milner, chief executive of Digital, was quoted in Estate Agent Today as saying: “We have firmly established ourselves as second in the market place and are most certainly gaining ground on the market leader.”

However, the Digital Property Group makes its claims based on combining web traffic for all their portals together, whereas rightmove.co.uk is a single website.

It isn’t the only claim the Digital Property Group have made about the November figures. Earlier this month findanewhome.com claimed it had overtaken UK market leader smartnewhomes.com as the most-visited new homes portal. smartnewhomes.com issued a statement suggesting that the number one spot was only held by findanewhome.com for a short period of time, meaning smartnewhomes.com is still the market leader.

Meanwhile propertyindex.com has issued a statement claiming it has not only overtaken one of its biggest competitors, globrix.com, but also bucked the market trend by doubling its visitor traffic in November. propertyindex.com came in at number fifteen on the list (211,000), with globrix.com at number twenty one (171,000).

Visitor numbers to propertyindex.com in November were reported to be more than double the amount recorded for October and five times the volume of visitor traffic reported for June 2008. By contrast traffic to all real estate websites in the UK fell by around 20%. In November total UK real estate traffic was 6,595,000 while in September it was as high as 7,719,000.

propertyindex.com’s chief executive, Lee Bramzell is putting a very positive spin on the comScore results:

“The fact that we’ve seen our traffic increase in a declining market bodes extremely well for the future. It’s certainly not all doom and gloom…”

“Industry insights such as the comScore figures are invaluable to new portals and will no doubt send a clear message to all estate agents and developers planning how best to market their properties for sale and rent in 2009.”

The comScore Top 10 for UK real estate in November 2008 was:

1. rightmove.co.uk
2. findaproperty.com
3 propertyfinder.com
4. primelocation.com
5. realestate.com.au
6. nestoria.co.uk
7. vebra
8. homesandproperty.co.uk
9. Trovit UK Homes
10. houseprices.co.uk

James Caan Buys 25% of look4aproperty.com

James Caan, entrepreneur and star of the BBC’s popular business pitching show, Dragon’s Den, has become chairman of independent UK property portal look4aproperty.com.

The news was announced on look4aproperty.com’s blog, which says that James Caan sees the move as a clear sign of his confidence in the UK housing market.

Through the investment arm of his business empire – Hamilton Bradshaw – Caan has secured a 25 per cent stake in look4aproperty.com. The exact figures involved in the deal have not been disclosed.

look4aproperty.com was founded by young entrepreneur Aaron Turner. “Aaron Turner is one of the most innovative and successful entrepreneurs in the country and I am delighted to be working with him,” said Caan.

Aaron Turner established look4aproperty.com in 2004, after working for 12 months as a ‘young MD’ for The Caudwell Group, which is the parent company of several other major businesses, including Phones 4U and 20:20 Mobile Group. During Turner’s time at the company he was the subject of a BBC documentary for The Money Programme.

Caan and Turner say they plan to announce a series of new products to kick-start the struggling UK housing market in the New Year.

“I see this investment as an important move in the face of the current recession,” says Caan.

nestoria.co.uk Price Comparison

nestoria.co.uk’s parent company, Lokku, has been working on a price comparison website, nestoholic.com, as an add-on to their already very successful property search.

Rather like Google Trends, nestoholic.com compares the average property prices by location. It uses the average asking price data from Nestoria’s considerable database, which is added to daily by property portals and agents. In this way, the statistics represent trends of the market from the seller’s point of view, rather than the buyer.

For example, comparing Manchester to Liverpool reveals that Manchester is 4.31% more expensive than Liverpool.



The results are accompanied by nestoria.co.uk listings for the two locations being compared, and Google ads.

There are still some glitches, and the website has not yet formally launched. Renthusiast quoted nestoholic.com developer Ruben Martinez as saying the current incarnation of nestoholic.com lacks the “superior geolocation of Nestoria,” but will have superior geo disambiguation in the next version.

rightmove.co.uk vs brightmove.co.uk?

In the world of property portals a name can be everything, and the bigger the company is the more closely guarded the branding and brand identity will be.

UK market leader rightmove.co.uk is no different and has taken great exception to brightmove.co.uk using such a similar name, and having such similar advertising slogans and straplines.

As Estate Agent Today points out, it’s a real life David and Goliath: brightmove.co.uk has 1 employee, 16 agents and 239 properties worldwide; while rightmove.co.uk has over 240 employees, 11,500 estate agents and over 1m properties.

brightmove.co.uk describes itself on its website as an “Internet Property Portal and Property Service Provider, also termed a Property Retailer by the Office of Fair Trading”.

brightmove.co.uk was established in 2000, and claims to have registered its name on 4 January 2000. The rightmove.co.uk trademark was also registered that year.

brightmove.co.uk’s owner Mike Osborn has received letters from rightmove.co.uk’s lawyers suggesting he is passing off Rightmove’s name and implying that he is exploiting their huge investment in marketing.

As a result, Osbsorn has now dropped his strapline ‘Make the right move with Brightmove’, and also now refers to the website optimistically as ‘the future No 1 internet property website’, rather than its previous strapline which was ‘the number one UK and worldwide internet property website’.

According to Estate Agent Today, Osborn is also considering some legal action of his own, arguing that brightmove.co.uk was the first to charge for listings, and saying that rightmove.co.uk could be passing itself off as brightmove.co.uk. “Obviously Brightmove is the prime name and Rightmove is a derivative of this name,” he is quoted as saying.

propertyportalwatch.com doesn’t think this is the last we’ll hear of rightmove.co.uk vs brightmove.co.uk - or is it going to be brightmove.co.uk vs rightmove.co.uk?

Read the full details at Estate Agent Today .

smartnewhomes.com Denies findanewhome.com Is No. 1

The battle to be top dog in the property portal business is not showing any signs of cooling down before the end of the year. In fact it seems to be heating up, particularly in the new homes market.

Earlier this week we published a story about findanewhome.com overtaking UK market leader smartnewhomes.com as the most-visited new homes portal according to Hitwise figures from November.

David Bexon, Managing Director of smartnewhomes.com, has since issued a statement refuting claims that they have been beaten to the number one spot by rival findanewhome.com. Bexham argues that the number one spot was only held by findanewhome.com for a short period of time (the final week of the Hitwise figures, 29 November), meaning smartnewhomes.com is still the market leader. He writes:

“The recent release issued by FindaNewHome.com, claiming to have been officially recognized as the ‘UK’s most visited new homes portal’ is both misleading and inaccurate.

Figures in the release, which state that FindaNewHome.com received 5.6% more visits than its nearest competitor – SmartNewHomes.com, are based on just one week’s worth of figures – ironically the only week in 2008 when FindaNewHome.com received slightly more unique visitors than SmartNewHomes.com throughout the whole of 2008 so far.

While I’m flattered that FindaNewHome.com clearly regard their recent success as a major victory, I would like to reassure our housebuilder clients that we are and remain the leading, most frequently visited website for the new homes market. We currently promote over 17,000 homes on our site, and have an average of over 270,000 unique visitors each month for this year.

Consumer traffic to SmartNewHomes.com has remained extremely strong in 2008. Whilst peaking and troughing at certain moments throughout the year, we have remained the UK’s number one new homes website, with an unparalleled level of visitors and new homes available for sale.

Further, I am confident that we will start the new year as we began the last – offering developers the most visited new homes website, and continuing to facilitate the home buying process for the majority of the country’s new home buyers. We will be re-launching our website early in 2009 with a new look, added functionality and enhanced mapping and search tools.”

Regardless of who beat whom, the competition is certainly tight and it’s one to keep an eye on.

We at propertyportalwatch.com can only wonder what 2009 holds – can smartnewhomes.com beat off the advances of findanewhome.com? Or will findanewhome.com build on the successes of this year to claim the number one position?

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.

Read more

Competition in New Home Portals

findanewhome.com has overtaken previous UK market leader smartnewhomes.com as the most-visited new homes portal according to Hitwise figures from November.

Read more

Connells Sells 18% Stake in rightmove

Today it was announced that Connells has sold 18% or 21m shares in rightmove for 155 pence / share. This announcement comes a day after Connells extended a long standing marketing agreement with rightmove that sees it advertising on the site until 2012.

Read more

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.

Managing Director Departs Vebra

Stephen McCluskey has left his role as managing director of UK based software company and portal Vebra.

The Negotiator reports that McCluskey spent four years with the company.

The magazine also reported that a spokesperson for Vebra said McCluskey stepped down to “pursue potential new opportunities”.

Vebra includes the software and marketing company vebra.info as well as the portal vebra.com and is owned by GMG Property Services, a division within Guardian Media Group. GMG also own thinkproperty.com and coresystems.co.uk.

Replacing McCluskey for now is Tim Summerley, who joined GMG Property Services in June 2008. He was formerly finance director and head of property management for The Chancellors Group of Estate Agents.

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