APRIL 2013 |
www.opp-connect.com WORDS | Candice Ritchie
BUSINESS
PROPERTY PORTALS | 59
Meet the listing legends Y
ou’re ready to sell your home and move into somewhere new, but you don’t want to
use an estate agent. What’s the fi rst question that plays on your mind? Usually it’s ‘where will I fi nd a buyer?’ Alternatively, you might be an estate agent or developer who is looking to increase your number of leads. How can you maximise your market exposure by a substantial amount, with minimal time and effort? The answer to both of these questions is a property portal. Property portals are websites which collate property listings from various sources. They enable buyers to fi nd their new home more easily and with access to a wider selection, and help sellers increase the amount of leads they receive on property sales.
Propertyportalwatch.com used
Google Ad Planner to take a look at the world’s market leaders in property portals (Jan 2012). They found that Australian portal
realestate.com.au topped the charts – they reached 17% of the population each month. Other fi gures show that the site accounts for 68% of the total minutes spent looking at property across the top 10 sites. The site also received 3.5m unique visitors in May 2012, more than double the portal in second place. They were also top for page views and session duration… the positive fi gures just seem to go on.
Closely behind were Luxembourg’s
athome.lu, reaching 15%, and Belgium’s
immoweb.be, which reached 14%. The
Netherlands and Ireland were next, with
funda.nl and
daft.ie, reaching 13.5% and 13.2% of the population respectively.
Rightmove were at the top for the UK, reaching 10.6% of the population – not surprising, given that it’s where two out of three UK buyers fi nd their new
“How can you maximise your market exposure with minimal time and effort?”
homes and where 80% of UK properties are marketed. OPP spoke to Shameem Golamy, head of Rightmove Overseas, who believes that the company became so successful among UK portals because they try to work with the best agents and developers. “Good agents are also good marketers so they tend to advertise the best products,” he said. “By us having the best stock on our website, it attracts more buyers. More buyers attract more sellers... and there we have it.” Indeed, statistics showed that three times as many leads were sent through the site in January 2013 compared to last year. Even the UK government has jumped on the portal bandwagon, creating
www.gov.uk/fi nd- government-property. The website lists government-owned properties that are available to rent or buy. But where will I fi nd the time to maintain all of my property listings? There is no doubt that it can be a time-consuming task, especially if you are marketing properties on a series of different portals. For this reason, there are an increasing number of ‘data feed’ websites, or
Advertising your property online is fast becoming the norm, but how to market them to reach the biggest, and best, audience is often tricky – that’s where property portals come in. Easily accessible and tailored according to buyers’ needs, portals are universally benefi cial. Candice Ritchie explores the long list of advantages
management tools. Virtual Portal (
www.virtual-portal.co.uk) for one, allows you to enter all of your data at once, and individually select which property should appear on which portal. The Property Portal Feeder (www.
propertyportalfeeder.com) does the same, but it will also automatically optimise and resize images, saving you the time of having to manually adjust them. OPP spoke to Stuart Sermon, Director at Property Portal Feeder, who said that the feeder was specifi cally designed to address the issues of uploading and maintenance time. “What makes us unique is that we will validate the property information and send it in the preferred format of each portal,” he said, “This ensures that all properties are accepted by the portals and can be found in all levels of the portals’ search results.” He also pointed to their client satisfaction, stating that many believe they can improve by allowing agents to manually enter information. “The one common factor with all of our clients is they are serious about what they do and what they want to achieve,” he added, “Just scraping their website and putting the data in a feed would be a waste of their money.”
In addition, there are several directories which list the top property portals, and where you can fi nd them – essentially, lists of lists! A handy tool, you might think. However, with so many lists circulating the internet, whether in portal or directory form, a buyer is surrounded with a mass of sources and often, replicas. So how can this be resolved? The answer would be to create one major list. This, of course, is easier said than done, given the fact that new lists are created every day in our business-orientated culture. Another option would be to create a joint listing service that acts as both a portal and a directory – and that’s exactly the idea some companies have had.
Mondinion.com, an international property portal and network of real estate portals, and
SearchEurope.com, a web directory, recently joined forces to create a co-branded website for European real estate listings. The new website (
www.searcheurope.mondinion. net) will allow Search Europe’s visitors to search European real estate listings sourced from
Mondinion.com. Both
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