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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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.