PORTALS
Home.co.uk, “Is customer-facing.
Our role is to be a search engine and that model allows us to have a comprehensive, inclusive model.” It also lets
Home.co.uk provide
an impartial view of the market. For instance, it has now produced lists of the top and bottom 20 selling towns. “Rightmove’s clients would be
really peeved with them if they blew the whistle on the areas that weren’t selling – but we can do it.”
Home.co.uk also has a huge estate
agent directory, from which it can supply instruction leads for free. Vendors can run a competitor analysis “on agents, their portfolios, what kind of property they’re good at selling, what postcodes they focus on, time on the market,” using
Home.co.uk’s database. Again, that is data that agents paying for a portal might not particularly want to be made public.
Home.co.uk is paid for by
advertising; other property sites have slightly different business models. Mouseprice, for instance, shows basic information for free, but offers more in-depth surveys and valuations on a paid-for basis.
Our site has evolved according to the demands of the market, promoting what our clients do.” steve lees smart new homes
more portals to come Doug Shephard believes that despite the rapid consolidation of the sector, and the decline of some of the first and second generation portals, there will be new entrants. “It’s a big market,” he says, “you’ve got over 16,000 potential customers out there. But when you arrive at the poker table you’ll need to have more chips these days – the game is getting more expensive.” Even so, it’s not impossible to
The portal sector has beome more complex, more
concentrated with an increasingly overlapping provision.
build something from relatively low initial investment. Peter Joseph points out that the way smaller portals can challenge the leaders is not “to build another Rightmove” and try to get up-front subscriptions, but to build a base of interesting data that is made
available for free, then start charging for additional features. The difficulty for the estate agent
is navigating through the different portals. As far as Peter Joseph is concerned, maximising reach is the right way to go, using as many portals as possible to ensure that no potential client is lost. He believes spending on portals should be the main marketing spend any agent commits to. “Shop windows and local papers now account for such a small percentage of enquiries that it’s hardly worth thinking about.” Doug Shephard has a more
nuanced view. He believes a lot depends on the size of the agent concerned. For multiple chains, he believes they may get better returns by investing more on their own website. “You should be playing the Search Engine Optimisation game and also putting some spend into Adwords.” Search engines and free portals will then deliver a steady flow of traffic. For smaller agents, he admits that Adwords bid values may be too high to make much impact; portals are likely to be more important investments for them. It’s interesting to note that only 11
per cent of
Home.co.uk’s hits come directly to the site, with another 12 per cent from partner sites. The overwhelming majority of traffic comes through search engines. That suggests that getting your properties into the search engines could ultimately be more important than getting on one of the major portals. If buyers are reaching your properties through Google, Nestoria or Mouseprice, how much is it worth to have them on Rightmove? There’s no one-size-fits-all,
though looking at the concentration of the market Rightmove obviously fits a good many. What is true, though, is the sector has become more complex and concentrated, with often overlapping provision as portals, publishers, and affinity networks strike deals with each other. Perhaps having seen consolidation at the top end of the list, it’s time some of the smaller portals linked up, to give agents more eyeballs for less headache?
Do you have any views to share?
www.propertydrum.com/articles/portals
24 FEBRUARY 2012 PROPERTYdrum
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68