UK Residents Just Looking

A survey commissioned by UK based property portal propertylive.co.uk has found that 69 percent of UK residents look at property online even when they are not actually planning to move.
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thinkproperty.com Free-to-List Growth

Late last year thinkproperty.com changed to a free-to-list model and it already looks to be paying off for the UK portal, with the company reporting that the number of agents listing on the portal has risen.
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propertylive.co.uk Spreads Its Wings

The much anticipated launch of propertylive.co.uk last year came and went with very little noticeable impact on the UK market.

This might be about to change, as the new portal has revealed grand expansion plans.

Global Edge reported this week that propertylive.co.uk is to accept overseas listings.

In keeping with the NFOPP’s vision for an industry accredited free-to-list portal, only agents that belong to NFOPP or an international body they recognise will be allowed to list property. This includes the NAR from the US, or the CEI in Europe.

propertylive.co.uk will initially gain overseas properties by taking a feed from the ICREA’s worldproperties.com.

They are also engaged in a huge £400,000 development and marketing campaign, which begins this month. Marketing packs are being sent to over 10,000 UK agents with the aim of getting agents to promote the portal to consumers.

The NFOPP’s CEO Peter Bolton-King has also reiterated the promise the propertylive.co.uk will remain free-to-list for all member agents.

Are UK Portals Really Losing Agents?

Last year Henry Pryor formed the Estate Agency Buying Group, to band together smaller estate agency firms in order to negotiate the best terms possible for 2009 with UK property portals. As we entered the new year, Pryor told propertyportalwatch.com that many agents are holding firm and not renewing contracts with the pay-to-list portals.

“I expect the bigger portals will loose around 2,500 to 3000 agents this year” says Henry Pryor. His Estate Agency Buying Group has had interest from over 4,800 agents.

“Neither The Digital Property Group (TDPG) or rightmove.co.uk has been prepared to negotiate either with groups of agents or individual firms. Many agents have lost patience with this approach and I expect that many will not be signing up in 2009. Many of these firms were original shareholders in primelocation.com and others have been loyal clients of both sites. This is the toughest market that most agents have ever experienced and they are having to look at all their overheads. Portals, like newspapers, have to realise that this is not a debate about the value that they may or may not bring to their clients but about trimming costs to ensure that they are able to help agents to survive the storm! This is not a market that will stand profiteering.”

Towards the end of 2008 several portals announced with great fanfare new or renewed agent signings. Pryor told propertyportalwatch.com:

“Although TDPG have trumpeted that they have been able to sign up Douglas & Gordon and Cluttons I don’t think that the other national firms will sign unless there is a significant lowering of expectations. Many smaller firms are so incensed by the arrogance that they feel has been shown that they have said that they will take their business elsewhere on principle. After all, in this market just how many enquiries are they going to miss if they cut their paid-for portal exposure by one or two? There are enough alternatives out there and if the portals that survive are able to justify charging higher rates to a firm who wants to rejoin then many estate agents are prepared to take that risk. It’s hard ball!”

It will take some months to ascertain if Pryor is correct, and to see if agents really do hold out and refuse to sign on with the portals. This, combined with the rise of free-to-list portals like globrix.com and propertylive.co.uk, and those with innovative ‘pay per lead’ models like propertyindex.com, means 2009 is shaping up to be another interesting year in the UK market.

propertylive.co.uk

propertylive.co.uk is the free-to-list portal belonging to the National Federation of Property Professionals (NFOPP) in the UK. It launched in beta form in October 2008.

propertylive.co.uk claims to be the only property search site that’s regulated, protected and run by a professional body of fully accredited agents. To list properties, agents must be members of the NFOPP’s organisations: National Association of Estate Agents (NAEA); Association of Residential Letting Agents (ARLA); National Association of Valuers and Auctioneers (NAVA); Institution of Commercial & Business Agents (ICBA).

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NFOPP’s propertylive.co.uk Finally Launches

Earlier this week we told you not to hold your breath, but we can now all relax. propertylive.co.uk is finally, really, truly, live.

It seems we underestimated the speed at which the NFOPP could get a website on the scale of propertylive.co.uk up and running.

In an interview with Estate Agent Today, Peter Bolton King, chief executive of NFOPP, said technical glitches had caused the site’s delay. Now they’ve been cleared up the team are busy loading onto the portal some 50,000 of the 200,000 properties they have already signed up.

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propertylive.co.uk Still Not Live

It’s becoming old news that propertyLive.co.uk is still not live.

The idea of the National Federation of Property Professionals (NFOPP), propertylive.co.uk is supposed to showcase UK commercial and residential property from around 13,000 estate agents, all of whom are members of a professional body under the NFOPP umbrella (eg: the NAEA). These agents will be able to place their listings for free.

The main question is whether the new site will present any competition to the UK’s existing Big 4. (See our opinion piece, What Is All The Fuss About?)

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NAEA Launching propertylive.co.uk, What is All the Fuss About?

Earlier this week I wrote a small piece on the launch of the Propertylive.co.uk site in the UK market.  I have given this some more thought and i fail to see what the fuss is really about.  Here is some food for thought.

Firstly, propretylive.co.uk will have, in theory, access to significant volumes of listings in the UK.  However, will they have noticeably more listings than rightmove.co.uk, propertyfinder.co.uk, dothomes.co.uk and so on?  I doubt it.  Remember, when a consumer does a search in a suburb, they rarely see all the listings available and as long as the consumer feels like the content is significant enough for their needs, they are likely to be satisfied with looking at one or two sites.

Secondly, as they are not charging to place listings on the site, how much will they really have to spend on marketing?  Remember, the UK market is extremely crowded with traditional brands such as rightmove.co.uk, propertyfinder.com, findaproperty.co.uk and primelocation.com having strong brand recognition.  (See my previous article on propertylive.co.uk http://propertyportalwatch.com/2008/08/new-site-backed-by-naea-to-launch-in-the-uk/)  Dislodging these incumbents is extremely difficult – even globrix.com, backed by News International, has a long way to go to break into the top echelons of UK property portals.

Thirdly, in a tough market, agents should be looking at the efficacy of the sites that they advertise on.  While they may want to save money by not advertising on rightmove.co.uk, the reality is that they still need leads and therefore would rather pay to receive leads than save GBP 400 per month and potentially receive little or no leads.  The true businesses likely to be impacted by the economic down turn are the print guys as they struggle to justify their high costs of advertising.

Finally, i dont know of any industry owned property portal site being successful in a market.  The challenge is that most industry bodies find it difficult to make the tough decisions and dont have access to the funds.  The often start with the right objectives but fail to achieve their goals.

The bottom line is that i dont believe that rightmove.co.uk or the other paid for portal sites have anything to fear from propertylive.co.uk.  The bigger challenges for them are to justify the prices they charge for the volume of leads they generate and to manage their infrastructure as the number of agents in the UK declines.

propertylive.co.uk, Backed by NAEA, to Launch in the UK

It has been reported this week that the National Association of Estate Agents in the UK is going to launch a free website in the UK – potentially as soon as September this year.  The site will be called propertylive.co.uk.  The 10,000 or so members of the association will be able to upload all their for sale and for let listings at no charge.

Now this is not the first free site in the UK with zoomf.com, globrix.com, and dothomes.co.uk (to name a few) all promoting agents listings for free.  To date these sites have worked in parallel with the big four – rightmove.co.uk, propertyfinder.com, fIndaproperty.co.uk and primelocation.com.   Agents tend to pay to be on one or more of the big four and then also use some of the others for additional leads.  

However with the economic down turn in the UK, the interest in searching for property online has decreased as can be seen in the decrease in page views to the top 4 sites – especially rightmove.co.uk.  The result is that less page views is likely to mean less leads for advertisers and therefore the paid for sites will find it harder to justify any price increases. 

 

On the other hand, the free sites, such as nestoria.co.uk and globrix.com have experienced good growth in the number of page views that they are generating.  Globrix.com (backed by News International) has made good progress since launch in January 2007.

 

However, to put it all in context, i have compared rightmove.co.uk to globrix.com and nestoria.co.uk, you can see that rightmove.co.uk dominates them both in terms of page views generated for agents.

 

Therefore, even though propertylive.co.uk is being launched and backed by the NAEA, they will have a very long way to go to make a real impact in the UK market.