14 | ONLINE WORDS | Shameem Golamy Get it right online
Online property portal Righmove Overseas has seen a massive jump in visitors so far this year from potential U.K. overseas property buyers…but why? Head of overseas at Rightmove Shameem Golamy discusses how greater choice, an optimised website and the awful British weather have come to make this happen.
Well here at Rightmove HQ all the graphs are going in the right direction [that’s bottom left to top right] and the mood is fairly upbeat. Working in a web company our mantra is: “If it moves, count it.” We trip ourselves up with the amount of data we throw around the offi ce here in rainy Milton Keynes, in the south east of England. In the fi rst four months of this year we saw nearly half a million unique visitors to the Rightmove Overseas website every single month. Compare that to the same period last year and that accounts to a whopping 30% increase in visitors. Impressive, but let’s get real. Does that mean there have been 30% more sales in the marketplace? I think not. But I do believe it signals a shift in
S
confi dence in the marketplace towards buying an overseas property. We can only speculate on why there seems to be
o we are at the midpoint of the year and apart from a lot of rain what is there to show for it?
more people on the Internet genuinely searching for overseas property. Here is my view on what is happening.
More choice
Rightmove Overseas now has over 65,000 searchable overseas properties providing our users with remarkable
“In the last year there was a 300% increase in visitors accessing our site on mobile devices”
selection of properties to choose from. We partner with over 550 advertisers who do a fantastic job of marketing their properties. Our job is to get people to the website, but to generate enquiries it relies on advertisers putting on the right stock at the right price and making it appealing to the audience. In April our advertisers saw a 44% year-on-year increase in enquiry levels
which surely provides a signifi cant boost to agent pipelines.
Tech-power
At Rightmove Overseas we salute the geeks: they are king and a pillar of making our business successful. They make our website easy to fi nd and have delivered a winning optimisation strategy that sees Rightmove Overseas appear at the top of the search engines for popular terms like “property in Spain” or “property for sale in Spain”. I am grateful for their relentless
passion in wanting to make our website faster and easier to use, while striving to provide an amazing consumer experience. Keeping the website running is tricky at the best of times and yet they manage this in conjunction with growing the number of visitors to our mobile platforms. In the last year there has been a 300% increase in visitors accessing our website on mobile devices such a tablets and smartphones and viewing our
Shameem Golamy is head of Overseas for Rightmove
BUSINESS
www.opp.org.uk | JUNE 2012
Good signal | Mobile searches are up
overseas properties on our Apple and Android Rightmove Apps.
Strength of the Pound The Pound rose signifi cantly against the Euro last year, making a property purchase in close-to-home European destinations an attractive proposition for U.K. buyers. Achieving a sense of urgency to buy an overseas property has always been a challenge for the agent selling property in foreign countries... but getting more for your money is really helping to bring buyers’ timetables forward.
Rainy bank holidays We have just had the wettest April in the U.K. for over a century ... and with this we see a direct correlation between continuous wet weather and an increase in Internet traffi c to our overseas website. Throw a public holiday into the mix and that equates to many people sat at home watching the rain through their windows. That happens so often in this country; it is easy to see why their thoughts turn to buying property in sunnier climates and as the rain keeps pouring down those thoughts suddenly become a lot more urgent.
Nobody knows what the future will The right connection | Optimising the Rightmove Overseas’ website has helped it to top search-engines for popular terms
hold. But what I do know is that while the Pound continues to strengthen against the Euro, the geeks will lead the rest of the Rightmove Overseas team in a rain dance around the offi ce..
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