Snow Drives Property Search

Data from a number of UK property websites has revealed an upside to recent freezing temperatures: big jumps in traffic.
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New Video Ads at homesoverseas.co.uk

Property portal and overseas property news website homesoverseas.co.uk has launched a new video advertising service, dubbed “HO TV”.
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smartnewhomes.com Wins Again

UK specialist new homes property portal, smartnewhomes.com, has received an honour at the Daily Mail UK Property Awards for the second year in a row.
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Smart New Look for smartnewhomes.com

UK specialist new homes property portal, smartnewhomes.com, has unveiled a new look, new content and new functionality. The changes come after the portal announced it was relaunching two months ago.
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smartnewhomes.com Smartening Up

smartnewhomes.com is about to launch a revamped version of its specialist UK “new build” property portal.
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New newhomesforsale.co.uk Partnership

UK portal newhomesforsale.co.uk, which specialises in new build homes, has announced a partnership with real estate search engine dothomes.co.uk. newhomesforsale.co.uk listings will now be included on dothomes.co.uk at no extra cost.
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smartnewhomes.com Warns of Crisis

Statistics released by one of the UK’s specialist new homes property portals, smartnewhomes.co.uk, and the UK’s market leading property portal, rightmove.co.uk, reveal some complicated trends in the market.

While increased numbers of users are busy searching for homes on these portals, the number of homes listed on the market seems to be declining.
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newhomesforsale.co.uk Increased Activity

newhomesforsale.co.uk, a UK portal specialising in new build homes, has reported a surge in activity from home-hunters and developers.
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Supermarket Chain ASDA Opens Portal

Homes in Asda, known online as homesinstore.co.uk, is UK supermarket chain Asda’s answer to property search.

Tom Rossiter, Managing Director of Homes in Asda explains:

“Homes in Asda offers a convenient new means of searching for property in your local area. Customers can browse homes for sale online, via their mobile, or during their weekly supermarket shop. With around 400,000 properties to be listed by the end of this month, the service will benefit consumers, local agents and developers alike.”

Unlike the much maligned bid by rival supermarket giant Tesco to join in the property sales arena, Asda is not cutting out the estate agent.

Asda stores also incorporate display pods for property mimicking estate agent window advertisements, which, over 2009 will become interactive touch-screen computer displays accessing the Homes in Asda database.

smartnewhomes.com is helping to power the ‘new build’ element of Homes in Asda, launched last week, by uploading its extensive database of new homes directly to the Asda website.

smartnewhomes.com represents over 85% of all new homes for sale in the UK and attracts over a quarter of a million visitors every month. Developers advertising on smartnewhomes.com will now benefit from the 1.5 million unique shoppers who search asda.com, every week.

David Bexon, Managing Director of smartnewhomes.com, comments:

“We are delighted to be involved in this new venture, which underlines our commitment to raising the awareness of new homes and the deals available to get people moving in this tough market. Homes in ASDA will provide a further means for developers to showcase their product, raising the profile of their homes and developments to an even wider audience of homebuyers. As well as exposure to another source of significant online traffic, our partnership with Asda means developers are able to reach consumers via an additional medium – allowing shoppers to browse potential properties in their local Asda store, which average over 35,000 customers per week.”

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

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