Property Portal Watch » UK News

Google Street View Expands in UK

Alice Allan — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 21:15:56 +0000

Google’s Street View has just been expanded to cover more than 95 percent of UK roads.

The move has been welcomed by zoopla.co.uk and s1homes.com, both of which are emphasising the benefits for their users.

“Being able to offer street-level imagery for the whole of the UK is an invaluable feature for our users as they search for homes to buy or rent and do their research on current home values and recent sold prices,” says zoopla.co.uk CEO Alex Chesterman. “zoopla.co.uk is all about providing useful tools to our users help them make better informed property decisons and Google Street View is an important part of that mission.”

“Since we introduced Google Street View on s1homes.com, it’s become one of the most popular features,” adds s1homes.com managing director Mark Smith. “Our users are spread across a wide geographic area, not just the main cities, so we are delighted that more will now benefit from it.”

According to The Press Association, the increased Street View coverage provides mapping of an additional 210,000 miles of British roads to the public.

New Partnerships for Nestoria

Alice Allan — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:24:30 +0000

Property search engine Nestoria has recently entered into three white-label partnerships in Spain, Germany, and the UK.

In Spain, nestoria.es has teamed up with El Correo Gallego, a regional media group based in Galicia, to provide their property search. nestoria.es explains that this is its first property search partnership.

In Germany, nestoria.de has linked with gutefrage.net, a new social network focused on asking and answering questions. Nestoria says gutefrage.net is one of the top 20 German language websites in terms of users.

In the UK, nestoria.co.uk has integrated with Buyers Edge, a service that helps match prospective buyers with qualified buying agents. Buyers Edge users can now search the nestoria.co.uk database in a co-branded environment.

These new partnerships mirror similar deals with The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and Channel 4 in the UK, and with Financial Times Deutschland, Capital magazine and Wetter in Germany, amongst others.

nestoria.co.uk Adds More Rentals

Alice Allan — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 03:01:46 +0000

UK-based property search engine nestoria.co.uk has just partnered with rentright.co.uk to expand its rental listings.

rentright.co.uk was originally established back in 2004 and provides a rental property search along with articles for tenants and agents, and a residential rental price index.

nestoria.co.uk was recently featured by Yahoo! UK and Ireland, and made changes to its search results pages with the aim of presenting house hunters with relevant content immediately.

Tesco and Spicerhaart’s Website Online

Alice Allan — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 22:49:16 +0000

“We simply sell homes” is the tagline of the new website – isold.com – from UK supermarket chain Tesco and estate agency group Spicerhaart. The website states that its service has been launched for Bristol, with a full launch coming soon.

isold.com describes itself as an estate agency and offers sellers the choice between three packages: “isold essential” for £999, “isold premium” for £1,119, and “isold premium plus” for £1,299. The website is promoting itself as a way to save on traditional agents’ fees, stating sellers can save up to £8,401.

According to isold.com, homes will be listed on “every major property website and in the right local newspapers”. rightmove.co.uk, findaproperty.com, globrix.com, and zoopla.co.uk are among the websites listed.

The creation of isold.com comes two and a half years after Tesco had to suspend the private home sales section of its website due to a ruling by the Office of Fair Trading. However a few weeks ago, Tesco was welcoming a new call from the OFT for more innovation in the home buying and selling process.

Rightmove Revenue Down in 2009

Alice Allan — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 23:58:39 +0000

Rightmove plc’s revenue for the 12 months to 31 December 2009 fell by 6 percent from £74 million to £69.4 million as a result of estate agency branch closures in 2008.

While revenue was down, the number of advertisers at the portal increased by 6 percent to 17,664. The company says “stringent cost management” brought underlying operating profit up by 2 percent from £41 million to £41.9 million. 48 percent of agents chose to buy additional advertising products at rightmove.co.uk.

Managing director Ed Williams had this to say about the company’s financial results:

“We have continued to invest to give our advertisers an even better proposition, whilst everyone else has been pulling back. The success of our marketing, quality of property presentation, and effectiveness at promoting an advertsiser’s brand to a very targeted audience has been complimented by the loyalty of our customers. In this challenging property market, we have given our customers a way of spending dramatically less than they used to in traditional media.

We are reporting operating margins are up for the year, mainly a result of early action in 2008 to bring down costs in terms of headcount. We have managed to achieve this whilst improving website performance and enhancing the support options to our advertisers through our customer service teams and regional seminars.”

rightmove.co.uk had plenty to celebrate in terms of website performance. The number of email enquiries sent to agents doubled from 5.3 million to 10.6 million. The company says rightmove.co.uk’s market share amongst the four largest UK property portals reached a record high of 83 percent in the last month. The portal also achieved one million visits in a single day for the first time on 25 January 2010.

With such strong figures, it’s unsurprising that Williams is confident the addition of property listings to Google Maps in the UK won’t effect rightmove.co.uk.

“They’ve already been doing this in the US and Australia and the market leaders there have seen no negative impact,” he told dailymail.co.uk. “Their service produces chaos – it’s like finding a needle in a haystack. Plus, they don’t charge advertisers so they’re not competing for our revenues.”

Another Surge at primelocation.com

Alice Allan — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 21:49:27 +0000

primelocation.com says cold UK weather is continuing to drive property hunters to search for homes overseas. According to the portal, searches on its international section increased by 134 percent between January 2009 and January 2010, and by 25 percent compared to December 2009.

Figures from primelocation.com show users were particularly interested in Australian property, moving Australia from 11th to sixth place on a list of the most searched-for destinations.

Cyprus, Turkey, and Bulgaria also attracted plenty of attention, registering search percentage increases of 55 percent, 55 percent, and 60 percent respectively.

“The upsurge in interest in international property show no sign of abating,” said Ann Wright, International Development Manager of Primelocation International. “January is the third consecutive month to have recorded an annual increase in searched of more than 100 percent.”

Portals Honoured by smarta.com

Alice Allan — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 21:16:17 +0000

UK property portal zoopla.co.uk, For Sale by Owner portal tepilo.com, and parking website parkatmyhouse.com are all among smarta.com’s inaugural “Smarta 100″ – a list of “remarkable companies who have gone the extra mile to differentiate themselves from the market or found clever ways to compete”.

smarta.com’s judges included BBC’s Dragons Den Deborah Meaden and Bebo Founder Michael Birch. “Discovering great new businesses is a passion of mine as is encouraging businesses to think and work better,” says Meaden. “The Smarta 100 does both of these things and celebrates the best of British business at the same time.”

smarta.com describes the businesses in the Smarta 100 as “the most exciting, promising, disruptive new businesses, the family businesses who remain the cornerstones of communities, the innovators ploughing their own furrows in staid or declining industries, the recession-busters making a mockery of the doom and gloom, the web wonders, the teenpreneurs, mumpreneurs, olderpreneuers and, er, just about anyone who’s running a small business worth shouting about”.

The winners don’t receive a prize, but as the smarta.com blog explains, the recognition should lead to “brand loyalty and, sooner or later, more sales”.

OFT Calls for UK Innovation

Alice Allan — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 22:37:29 +0000

The UK’s Office of Fair Trading says more innovation is needed in the home buying and selling process, as the housing market remains dominated by traditional estate agents with weak competition between them on price.

In its market study, the OFT argues that innovation, particularly through online services, could have a dramatic impact on the cost of buying and selling a home.

According to telegraph.co.uk, at least one company is already looking at providing an alternative to traditional selling methods: UK supermarket giant Tesco.

Tesco was rumoured to be moving into property listings through a deal with real estate agency chain Spicerhaart as early as October last year. telegraph.co.uk states listings could be added “within weeks” and says home owners would be able to list their properties for a flat fee of around £200.

A Tesco spokesperson told telegraph.co.uk:

“We welcome the OFT’s conclusion that legislation can be updated to make it easier for new entrants to service customers and that a ‘recognised and trusted brand’, such as Tesco, entering the market would allow for greater competition between online services and traditional estate agents, to the benefit of the consumer.”

rightmove.co.uk Best Optimised Portal

Alice Allan — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 22:22:22 +0000

globaledge.co.uk’s list of the top 20 best optimised overseas property portals has just been released, with rightmove.co.uk taking out first place.

globaledge.co.uk’s list is based on algorithms that query Google to examine website rankings for the most popular English-language overseas property queries. Each portal is then ranked according to the number of times it appears in the top 20 and top three of Google’s organic search results. globaledge.co.uk provides more information about its methodology here.

rightmove.co.uk is now up three places, beating last quarter’s top portal, themovechannel.com. globaledge.co.uk says this may reflect Google’s increasing use of brand name searches and analysis of user journeys to determine relevancy.

europeanproperty.com was the only new entrant to the top 10 in seventh place, while troubled portal propertyindex.com moved into the top 20 for the first time, jumping from number 43 to number 14.

zoopla.co.uk also joined the top 20 at number 15, which globaledge.co.uk puts down to its recent acquisitions.

XML2U links with themovechannel.com

Alice Allan — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 00:14:08 +0000

XML2U, a data file generator that aims make adding and editing property portal listings easier, has teamed up with international property portal themovechannel.com.

Through the partnership, themovechannel.com members can have the listings on their websites automatically uploaded and updated through an XML2U data file.

“Agents no longer have the time to manually add and edit their properties on property portals, yet many do not have an affordable method to upload and update their listings automatically,” explains the movechannel.com’s Robin Brayne.

“Partnering with XML2U means we can offer agents an inexpensive data file generating facility. We have been trialing the system over the last three months and have seen a significant increase in agent sign ups.”

XML2U says it utilises a Google-like “spidering” technology to collect the properties from the agent’s website, and then generates the data file. It also provides a conversion service for agents whose data file formats are not accepted by the portals on which they wish to advertise.

XML2U charges £10 per month per branch for its service.