New Portal to Join UK Market

UK-based real estate service provider One Property Solutions is set to launch a new portal in March. The portal will offer unlimited listings as long as users buy one “ancillary service”, such as a survey or Home Information Pack, each month.
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And The Fastest Growing UK Portal Is…

Earlier this month we published the comScore UK Top 10 for June 2009 in the category of real estate.
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home.co.uk Accused of Mis-Marketing

Reports in The Negotiator suggest that UK property search engine home.co.uk has been accused of mis-marketing properties listed by a UK estate agent.
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INEA Link to home.co.uk and Develop RemoteAgent

A statement released by the UK’s Independent Network of Estate Agents (INEA) reveals that they have partnered with home.co.uk to provide a live feed of their agent listings to the UK portal.

As a result, the INEA say their listings will soon be found on nestoria.co.uk, Channel 4, Estate Angels, The Independent, AOL, The Telegraph, Globrix and Mouseprice.

“We are pleased to announce that a live feed has been created from INEA to home.co.uk” the INEA statement says.

“We strongly feel that the future of property portals and to the benefit of agents is portals and systems working together.”

home.co.uk seems to be a portal that is going places, with a revamp for 2009 already resulting in an increase in traffic to the portal.

And the INEA have also been very busy of late.

Trevor Mealham of the INEA took its RemoteAgent concept to Inman Connect in the New York earlier this month.

RemoteAgent is a media product that allows agents to “expand their brand” by taking their properties and services and their fellow agents’ mls listings to remote locations. An empty shop window, a shopping mall, café, or waiting room, anywhere really, with a portable video screen acting like a shop front window.

The INEA call it the “ultimate agents window”. It allows agents to take their listings to the people – rather than waiting for the people to come to them. The INEA hope it bridges the gap between shopfronts and the web.

As well as generating leads and potential revenue from third party advertisements, it also has scope for partnerships with other local businesses. Viewers can receive text messaged property lists and full details from RemoteAgent in around 30 seconds, delivered straight to their mobile.

INEA mls will be launching RemoteAgent in the UK early 2009. In the meantime, you can watch a video about Remote Agent here.

home.co.uk’s New Look Increases Popularity

Last week propertyportalwatch.com reported that UK property search engine home.co.uk had begun 2009 with a new look website.

“Technology improvements have been our primary focus over the last 12 years and this fresh new look is really ‘the icing on the cake’,” commented Doug Shephard, of home.co.uk.

home.co.uk have also told propertyportalwatch.com that their new look has been met with excitement by their users.

The company says ”soaring traffic levels over the first few weeks of January suggest it’s proving very popular. The number of buyers the website attracts, in particular, has risen far above previous levels, despite the property slump.”

Interestingly, both rightmove.co.uk and globrix.com have also reported rising leads or traffic in January.

home.co.uk Revamped

Renthusiast has brought our attention to the fact that UK property search engine home.co.uk has been revamped.

Instead of the old two colours, it’s now full colour, slicker, tidier, and easier to use.

home.co.uk claims to have built the most comprehensive database of UK residential properties advertised for sale on the Internet, although comScore figures rank them at number 28 in the UK, behind all the big name portals, with 119,000 unique visitors.

One feature propertyportalwatch.com particularly likes about home.co.uk is their statistics page which is updated daily to reveal data about property listing info on the portal. For instance, when we checked there were 727,484 unique homes for sale, of which 43,821 had been placed on the market in the last 14 days, from over 16,393 agents in their directory. And, of the 6,506,809 properties viewed by homebuyers last month they had 411,444 click throughs to property details.