propertyfinder.com, a leading UK property portal, is to supply Virgin Media broadband customers with an exclusive new property search capability. The agreement with Virgin Media enhances propertyfinder.com’s position as the exclusive property portal of choice for many of the UK’s major websites, including AOL, MSN, Yahoo and Tiscali and highlights the key role that it plays in online property search. propertyfinder.com is the fastest growing major property portal with over 1.88 million unique visitors in January 2007 alone . The website provides access to over 290,000 UK properties for sale or rent, with users being able to contact 4100 of the market’s leading estate agents that choose to list their properties with propertyfinder.com. Warren Bright, Chief Executive Officer of propertyfinder.com, says: “Our partnership with Virgin Media is further proof of the quality of propertyfinder.com, which continues to witness a massive rise in the numbers of visitors to the website every month.”

Posted by at 05:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In just a few short years the internet has shifted from a position on the periphery of the marketing mix to now being one of the most talked-about and thought-about weapons in the agent’s armoury. But are estate agents really aware of exactly how they can make the most of the web? At propertyfinder.com we believe there are 8 Golden Rules that agents need to follow:

Rule Number 1 – Get the basics right, starting with your own website

The starting point is to ensure you get your own website right. This should be easy but all too often estate agents get it wrong. The basics are really simple: make sure your website reflects your brand; your navigation is clear; that content is grouped into areas which make sense; and that contacting you via email or phone is really, really easy (TIP: put your phone number on your homepage). The biggest mistake we see is estate agents thinking from their ‘Business Out’ rather than ‘Customer In’. By that we mean you need to think about the online experience from your customer’s point of view rather than your own. Remember that you serve two distinct market segments: people with properties to let or sell; and people who want to buy or rent. They have different points of view and different needs. The first group are most interested in what you can offer them and why they should consider you. The second group are interested in looking at properties. Too many estate agents simply cater for the second group, despite the fact it is the first that are the lifeblood of an agency. So be sure you have considered what you want each group to experience, to know and to do when they visit your site and build it accordingly.

 

Rule Number 2 – Put special emphasis on vendors and landlords

We all know that without instructions it is very difficult to build a successful agency. So why do so many estate agents completely ignore vendors and landlords when it comes to their websites? A big mistake some agents make is getting vendors as far as their home page and then not telling them what to do or where to go. There’s no point spending money to send people to your site and then not having a section for them. It’s a simple error, yet one we see repeated time and time again. Great estate agents are the ones who have specific sections for vendors and landlords, sections that sell their service, that explain why their agency is different, that explain the selling or letting process and that contain testimonials and recent sales information. These sections have to be easy to find, constantly updated and allow requests for valuations to be as simple as possible.

 

Rule Number 3 – Advertise where people are looking

It is very easy for estate agents to be distracted by the plethora of sites that seem to be launching every other week. The most important thing for estate agents to remember is that they need to be where the largest groups of customers are looking – and that is on a selection of the big four major property portals (TIP: The average UK agent is now on just under 2 portals so for maximum national presence use propertyfinder.com or Rightmove) or on Google. Focusing on other smaller property portals is a waste of time and effort. They simply don’t have the traffic and your vendors don’t know or care what they offer so they won’t differentiate you at the point of instruction. Look at the major property websites and choose a selection of the ones that give you the most traffic. Don’t make the mistake of only picking one portal, they all have different audiences so choose a couple.

 

Rule Number 4 – The internet also builds brand, so have a separate online budget for it

Many estate agents make the mistake of thinking that the internet is only good for advertising property listings and it doesn’t build brand awareness. This is a fundamental mistake. In all other major industries marketers have realised the power of the internet in building brand. Over 1 billion pounds was spent last year on the internet by brand marketers in the UK, so it is important that estate agents get on board. Sites like propertyfinder.com offer agents an ability to build their brands and ‘own’ their area by choosing from a range of brand building products such as the guaranteed top spot or branded banner advertising, both of which are offered to one estate agent per area. Successful estate agents then use brand ads to specifically target vendors and landlords. These tools significantly boost an agent’s profile and the leads and traffic to an estate agents website.

 

Rule Number 5 – Stand out from the crowd

One of the challenges of the internet in the past is that it has been all vanilla, vanilla, vanilla, making it difficult for estate agents to stand out from competitors. However this has now all changed. We’re now seeing bigger, more creatively powerful ads. We’re seeing new positions being created, such as Featured Properties. We’re also seeing a greater use of what’s known as ‘Rich Media’ and Flash ads, which basically means harnessing all the movement which is available online to make your ads stand out even more. Successful estate agents understand the importance of standing out online, just as they do offline. The key is most of these products are exclusive to one agent per area so make sure you don’t delay too long or you’ll miss the boat completely.

 

Rule Number 6 - Quality, quality quality in everything. Why do estate agents spend hours reviewing their print advertising and no time at all reviewing the quality of their online ads?

Whether it’s a website, an ad or simply the way we interact online, quality is absolutely vital. Remember, if your website has errors on it, if your photos are non existent or poor quality, if your descriptions are abbreviated or pages in length, it all reflects on your brand and your business. These days customers will react spectacularly well to a company that offers them a great online experience, one that is high quality throughout. But the opposite is also true: treat customers to a poor experience i.e. no photos or only one photo, poor quality images, poor descriptions and they not only remember it, they also tell their friends. Remember, in today’s age the majority of vendors and landlords go online and pretend to be buyers or tenants to check you out before they call, so make sure you get the quality right.

 

Rule Number 7 – Actively manage your online adverts and your leads

With the internet you can – and you should – constantly change and update your ads. For example why not change photographs to attract new buyers or use some of the new ad spots that let you feature specific properties for short periods of time. It’s also vital that you track the success of your marketing activity – online and offline. That means checking the sources of your enquiry. Estate agents consistently spend substantial sums on print advertising and yet in almost every case study online continually dominates the results when it comes to enquiries. So track what works and shift your spend accordingly. The simplest thing to do is appoint someone within the office to actively track and manage all of your leads (right through to completion) and you’ll soon get a feel for where you should be spending your marketing dollars.

 

Rule 8 – Make sure your team knows how your online strategy makes you different. It’s all too easy to delegate online activity to the resident ‘geek’.

This is a critical error. Our view is that the successful estate agencies are those that educate and train every single person in their business on how to use the web. It is everybody’s job to continually monitor the quality of your advertising. It is everybody’s responsibility to actively manage listings and leads. It’s everyone’s job to understand the different property portals and how they can differentiate you from your customers, particularly for your sales people at the point of instruction. 

  

These are the 8 Golden Rules. They’re not exhaustive, and they won’t necessarily turn everyone into an internet marketing guru overnight. But they do work. They’ve worked for many estate agents in London and Australia. And they’ll more than likely work for you.

 

Warren Bright is the Chief Executive of propertyfinder.com.  He has significant online and estate agency experience having been the Chief Executive of News Corporations online businesses in Australia as well as the Chief Operating Officer of Australia’s number one independent estate agency, McGrath Estate Agents, a company with over $2bn worth of annual sales. 

 

 

Posted by at 05:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

At The Forum inaugural event, Australian Estate Agency boss and best-selling author John McGrath revealed the secrets from down under which have put his business on top.

Speaking at Smithfield London in early January, McGrath’s extraordinary presentation treated over 100 delegates to his story of building a business from rock bottom to a network of eight offices with sales of over $2 billion.

McGrath recalled being at school with Russell Crowe. The two of them were bottom of the class, constantly in trouble and remain close friends to this day. Indeed, years later McGrath would break the Australian record for a real estate purchase when selling Crowe an apartment overlooking Sydney Harbour.

The crux of McGrath’s presentation was how to win more instructions and gain more applicants. He shared with an enthusiastic audience the secrets of working half as many hours and making twice as much money, as well as giving his view on how to make an estate agency stand out as a marketing brand. ‘Remember, if you change nothing, nothing changes’ were his parting words.

The Forum, sponsored by propertyfinder.com exists to encourage estate agents to meet, share their views, discuss current issues and gain valuable and insightful market intelligence.

‘This first Forum meeting was a huge success’ observed Warren Bright, CEO of properyfinder.com. ‘We were fortunate in having such an inspirational and world-renowned business leader as our first guest speaker. We hope to build upon this.

Feedback on the Event:

Usually not a fan of seminars and often disappointed but this was great all round -well worth my time!
- Kristjan Byfield, Base Property Specialists

Excellent seminar, John McGrath's an incredibly motivating and inspiring speaker who really knows his stuff
- Anna Zolfaghari, Abbey Properties

Posted by at 04:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I am writing in response to Bob North's recent column on property portal traffic. In this article Bob North made mention of the fact that propertyfinder.com were not prepared to release their figures and so "have been excluded from the table". This is not the case. We are more than happy to release the figures that have been verified by a third party providor, such as comScore, but only on the grounds the other sites do the same. Bob refused this request. So we chose not to participate in the comparison.

At the moment, Bob's table is nothing more than marketing claims made by portals. Claims that are not verified or substantiated in any way. For all we know the figures in the table could be complete fabrications. The facts are simple, most numbers presented in this table each month, when compared to independent third party measures, are grossly inflated. For example, in the latest comScore MediaMetrix report for November, the following UK only unique visitor figures were reported:

• Rightmove 3,009,000
• propertyfinder.com 1,168,000
• Findaproperty 1,128,000
• Primelocation 1,116,000

comScore tracks the actual internet usage of a panel of 25,000 web users across the UK. This panel is created to accurately reflect the UK population. It accurately tracks work and home usage and in our experience is extremely accurate at tracking traffic from UK based visitors.

Obviously these figures are substantially lower than the figures in Bob's column. So unless over 45% of Rightmove, Findaproperty and Primelocation's traffic comes from overseas visitors, which is highly unlikely based on our own experience, we have to question the validity of the numbers presented by Bob's comparison.

The position we put to Bob numerous times was that propertyfinder.com did not agree with his using information that was not verified and was therefore potentially misleading. We provided Bob with the comScore information on the UK market, however, he chose not to use it.

propertyfinder.com strongly supports the transparent reporting of traffic information to the industry, but does so using verified information. Should Bob choose to insist on a clear definition of the information he requires, and require that all informationbe verified by an independent third party, then propertyfinder.com would be happy to be a part of any industry comparisons.

Warren Bright

CEO

propertyfinder.com 

*This article appeared in the February 2007 edition of Estate Agency News. The article Warren Bright refers to can be seen below:

Major portals' traffic stabilises

THE traffic generated by the major property portal sites appears to have stabilised after five years of continuing increase — but the overall use is still massive and virtually every property for sale in the UK must be on one of the portals.

Since our last survey in the August edition, property numbers have gone up by some 60,000 or four per cent, with Prime Location increasing by the largest amount and Rightmove still increasing their already dominant numbers to just over 800,000.

There has also been quite an increase in overseas property numbers — now at over 150,000 between these four major portals.

In the main, the figures speak for themselves but there has been some rationalisation of the way the figures have been calculated and indeed in the structure of the sites, so the reports reflect these new structures.

Find a Property have totally revamped their site and the numbers reflect this, while Rightmove have changed the way they measure offices. Property Finder were not prepared to release their figures and so have been excluded from the table.

There is no doubt that Rightmove continue to be the major player and that the value of Fish4 is being questioned but Find a Property are expanding in the North at the moment and many agents are starting to re-evaluate Prime Location for their appropriate offices.

It will be interesting to see what impact the new ownership of Think Property has on the influence that they have and whether the other software suppliers will be prepared to co-operate with Vebra to facilitate uploads.

I am going to try to focus this quarter on probably the most important aspect of promoting properties through these major portals — the cost.

Rightmove have increased the actual monthly charge to agents — it is now £300 per office per month for offices outside the Central London area and £360 inside.

Prime Location are still more at £360 and £450 respectively while Find a Property are still offering flexible rates and Fish4 are staying with their pay per lead structure — £1 per e-mail and 30p per click-through.

It is not the actual cost per month that is the issue — more importantly it is the effectiveness of the portal at delivering value to your offices.

And value is not confined solely to the number of inquisitive buyers or renters.

It is important also to look at the role the portal plays in enabling you to get instructions and to manage your business.

As far as the the potential buyer/renter leads are concerned, you need to know the number of leads that come through to you.

The portals can provide these in terms of e-mails, clicks to your site (where applicable) and increasingly in direct telephone contacts to you from the dedicated numbers they provide on the sites.

All the major portals are now measuring these numbers, although Fish4 were not able to provide them to me in the timescale required for this article.

I can calculate the average number of leads per office — Find a Property and Rightmove lead the way at 106 and 105 respectively — but you need to do the calculation for your own offices using the actual data for them.

Once I have the number of leads it is simply a question of calculating the cost per lead. The average ranges from approximately £2 with Find a Property to £5 with Prime Location and £3 for Rightmove.

You will now have one factor for your own individual matrix.

On the question of instructions, do you measure how many you get as a result of your association with the portal — or even the converse: how many do you not get because you are not able to offer a particular site?

It may be that one portal is more relevant in one particular market. Rightmove have certainly achieved a high public awareness in the overall market but maybe Prime Location has an extra edge in the top end? You have to try to measure the results.

One of the important factors in your relationship with your portal is the way that you use the information they provide to give your office(s) a competitive edge.

The majority of offices may be members of Rightmove but very few actually use all the tools that they provide and so some can still gain an advantage by utilising all the facilities.

One of the most obvious ways that portal membership can be leveraged is actually when talking to clients and that comes down to the belief that the individuals in your organisation have in the benefits that accrue.

A friend of mine recently wanted to market her house and she told me of the different approaches from the valuers.

Some paid lip service to the fact that they advertised with ‘x’ and ‘y’ but others spoke sincerely of the benefits and the results that the office achieved.

Training and making sure that everyone in the office is aware of your net presence is absolutely vital.

Of course, there are sites other than the ones that provide me with the data and many of them may well provide value to your business.

The principles I have described above should help you to evaluate them.

Bob North, Estate Agency News, December 2006 / January 2007 

 

Posted by at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Today the REA Group (realestate.com.au Ltd, ASX:REA, and its subsidiary companies) announced the signing of its third European acquisition in 14 months, the atHome group of real estate sites for €4.5 million (AU$7.5 million). atHome operates five real estate sites covering Luxembourg (residential and commercial sites), the Wallonie region of Belgium, the Lorraine region of France, and the Trier region of Germany. Over 500 agents use the sites; the business is profitable and is rapidly growing.

“The acquisition of the atHome group of sites continues to build out our European operations by providing the REA Group with a presence in four new markets,” said Simon Baker, Managing Director of the REA Group. “The high quality of the local management team is an attractive element of this acquisition.”

Baker said the REA Group will work with atHome’s management team to solidify its market-leading position in Luxembourg and to continue to drive its expansion into Belgium, and selected regions of France and Germany.

Key components of the acquisition include:

• atHome.lu: The largest real estate website (traffic measured by CIM) in Luxembourg and one of that country’s 10 top websites of any category by traffic.

• atOffice.lu: A real estate portal for Luxembourg’s commercial real estate market. • atHome.be: Launched in September 2005, this site is the second most popular site in the south of Belgium, which borders Luxembourg.

• atHomeLorraine.fr: Launched in October 2004, this is the leading real estate website for the North Lorraine region of France, which borders Luxembourg.

• atHome54.de: Launched in April 2006, this site targets the area around Trier, Germany, from whose postal code it derives the 54 in its name.

• 51% equity stake in Altowin, a leading provider of office management tools for real estate agents in the Belgium market.

In addition, atHome also partners with RTL (Radio Television Luxembourg) to provide real estate television and radio programming in Luxembourg.

About the REA Group realestate.com.au Ltd. (ASX:REA) and its subsidiary companies, known as the REA Group, make up a global online real estate advertising company head quartered in Melbourne, Australia. The company operates realestate.com.au, realcommercial.com.au and propertylook.com.au in Australia; propertyfinder.com and the London Property News in the UK; and allrealestate.co.nz, realcommercial.co.nz and propertylook.co.nz in New Zealand. Also, on completion of the REA Group’s latest acquisition of Italian website casa.it (anticipated to occur in February 2007) it will operate the market leading residential website in Italy. The REA Group's businesses also include estate agent office management tools and web design services, mortgage brokering, and real estate print publishing. The REA Group had revenues of AUD$61m in FY 2006, is used by more than 12,000 agents, has approximately 6.8m unique visitors per month (Nielsen NetRatings, Omniture), is profitable and has a current market capitalization of more than A$680m. As a listed company, realestate.com.au operates as an independent entity. 

Posted by at 09:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)