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

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.

globrix.com Adds PropertyAdd

globrix.com seems to be going from strength to strength, snaring yet another deal with a real estate agency software provider.

PropertyAdd are the latest company to agree to set up a direct feed to globrix.com.

It’s the second announcement of this kind of deal this week alone, and shows that globrix.com are forging ahead in terms of establishing the key relationships vital to the success of their search engine.

PropertyAdd will no doubt join the list of 25 existing software and hosting providers that globrix.com recommend in its partner program selection. This far outweighs the five on the list of hosting companies it cannot take a crawl or feed from, but even listings from these sources can end up on globrix.com by being inputted manually.

Interestingly, the partner list includes Vebra, with whom the search engine have a paid agreement after Vebra blocked the globrix.com crawler.

The exact details of the Vebra deal remain undisclosed, and it remains to be seen if this becomes standard practice, setting a precedent for search engines to pay a fee in order to collect listings from hosting or software providers.

globrix.com and Vebra Reach Agreement

Free-to-list real estate search engine globrix.com announced on Friday that negotiations have concluded with Vebra, bringing to an end the software provider’s block on the Globrix crawler.

globrix.com posted the following announcement on their blog:

“As any of our Vebra clients will be aware, Vebra recently blocked the Globrix crawler. This meant that over 100,000 property listings were removed from Globrix.

This was obviously a big concern for us here at Globrix, and of course many of the agents who were used to receiving free traffic from Globrix were disappointed to find they could no longer be a part of the site.

The good news is that we have been in negotiations with Vebra ever since this issue came to light and we are now very pleased to announce that we have come to an agreement. Vebra are one of the largest estate agency software companies in the UK, so we are really pleased to be working together towards the common goal of helping agent’s market their properties.”

Estate Agent Today reported that Vebra customers will be able to authorise the upload of their data to globrix.com at no additional cost to them, putting agents in control of their own data.

Globrix also announced a new partnership with agency software provider, DezRez, who is now providing a direct datafeed to Globrix.

Read our earlier story on Vebra blocking the globrix.com crawler here.

Vebra Blocks globrix.com

Last week Vebra blocked the globrix.com crawler from picking up properties from Vebra hosted agents.

globrix.com say in a blog update that the crawler has been operating for over a year, and yet Vebra are “insisting that a charge is levied for a feed on the grounds that crawling disrupts their service (the reality being that the Globrix crawler mimics one single user slowly clicking through all Vebras agents which is very little traffic)”.

globrix.com say the costs currently under discussion are “prohibitively expensive” and “somewhat unfair” as globrix.com are providing what they consider to be a value added service in the form of free traffic for Vebra.

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. Last week we reported that thinkproperty.com was rumoured to be changing to a free-to-list model.

As the situation stands “all agents who host their properties with Vebra will not be receiving free traffic from globrix.com”, while globrix.com and Vebra continue their negotiations.