Property Ad Guru » Which Property Portal?

Greenlight Reveals UK Visibility Shares

Alice Allan — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 23:52:40 +0000

UK consulting firm Greenlight recently released a report that reveals the most visible property websites and advertisers in a Google search.

The report, which is based on Google searches from February 2010, show plenty of home hunters are looking for places to rent, with the term “for rent” accounting for 35 percent of all real estate-related searches during the month:

So where are these property hunters finding their listings? Greenlight also determined the best positioned and therefore most visible real estate websites, based on their volumes for each keyword and their respective ranking on page one of Google. Their top 10 most visible websites in a natural search are as follows:

1. primelocation.com
2. fish4.co.uk
3. rightmove.co.uk
4. findaproperty.com
5. zoopla.co.uk
6. torent.co.uk
7. yahoo.com
8. holiday-rentals.co.uk
9. leaders.co.uk
10. dreamvillarentals.com

“primelocation.com achieved 70 percent share of voice through ranking at position one for 23 of the 2,800 keywords analysed, including the most searched for term ‘For rent’, which accounted for 823,000 searches in February,” Greenlight says.

“Interestingly, rightmove.co.uk ranked at position one for 106 terms, yet it did not rank on page one at all for the keyword ‘For rent’,” the company adds. “Due to this it lost vital overall share of voice in natural search and attained position three in our league table.”

The top 10 websites in terms of visibility for generic lettings keywords were as follows:

1. primelocation.com
2. fish4.co.uk
3. torent.co.uk
4. holiday-rentals.co.uk
5. yahoo.com
6. leaders.co.uk
7. rightmove.co.uk
8. findaproperty.com
9. dreamvillarentals.com
10. ownersdirect.co.uk

It’s only when Greenlight ranks UK websites in terms of visibility for generic sales keywords that the list is more in line with the familiar ranking by unique visitor numbers:

1. rightmove.co.uk
2. findaproperty.com
3. primelocation.com
4. fish4.co.uk
5. zoopla.co.uk
6. home.co.uk
7. homesonsale.co.uk
8. globrix.com
9. whereismyproperty.com
10. mypropertyforsale.co.uk

Is visibility in Google searches important to you when choosing a property portal? Let us know your thoughts in our comments.

It’s More Than Just An Ad On A Portal

John Hart — Tue, 18 May 2010 23:00:02 +0000

Real estate clients’ expectations of online marketing are continuing to grow, so it’s vital that we give them access to a wide range of advertising options, particularly on property portals.

Having a basic listing on a property portal can only provide limited exposure. It’s vital that portals have product provisions that give agents the ability to not only maximise the exposure of their listings on behalf of their customers, but also to expose their own brand.

At the same time, part of any agents marketing presentation should be focused on how their sellers can obtain the best possible result online. Agents spend a great deal of time doing this around offline marketing, but too few really put the emphasis on new media. Yet a rapidly growing percentage of their potential customers are extremely Internet savvy.

So what are the main areas of product that property portals are (or should be) providing to assist an agent’s business?

Listing Placement: products that provide prominence to individual listings.
Push marketing products: electronic brochures, email alerts distributed to targeted portal databases.
Display advertising: banners, skyscrapers, advertorial, pop-ups and other items designed to promote estate agency brands and drive traffic to agent sites.
Web design: Agency websites, individual property mini-sites.
Back-office tools: Online products designed to increase agency effectiveness.

It’s my view that the “depth-of-product” available to agents from a property portal should be one of the considerations for agents selecting which portal to advertise on and how much of their marketing budget to allocate to each.

Depth-of-product has the ability to increase the average leads received from a portal quite substantially by providing relevant and effective advertising products. But an agent needs to think strategically about how they can utilise and leverage these products.

If an agent approaches this seriously it could also be a key factor in a prospective customer choosing that agent over their competitor (see our related article: Selling Online Advertising to Vendors).

Along with these products, support should also be available to enable agents to on-sell them to their customers, and to provide agents with the conviction to develop an effective online marketing plan.

To sum up, some of the points agents should consider when choosing a portal include:

Promoting their brand and business:
1. What products are available and what are the benefits?
2. What is my approach and budget?
3. What do I want to achieve?

How can I better promote my customers’ properties?
1. What products are available?
2. Do my sales people understand the benefits?
3. How do I sell and leverage these products?
4. Do I charge the customer? If so, how much?

John Hart spent over six years with REA Group, operator of leading Australian property portal realestate.com.au. Prior to REA, John was with one of Australia’s largest real estate networks, First National, for 12 years, with more than seven as their national marketing manager.

[Image: flickr/aussiegall]

Which Portal is Right for You?

Alice Allan — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 23:30:23 +0000

The question of which portal to advertise on – and how many – is one that real estate companies will always struggle with. Trying to get the best return on your investment along with maximum coverage is tricky.

Adding to the issue is the fact that real estate portals have a tendency to appear like weeds in many markets. So how do you make the right choice and not waste your marketing dollars?

It goes without saying that you need to research your own market carefully to start with. What’s right for one agency might not be right for yours, even if you do operate in a similar area or are part of the same franchise.

You will most likely know who the biggest player is in your area, and you should have an awareness of some of the second tier portals as well. What you may not know are the actual success factors of those portals versus the marketing hype. It can be helpful to have a representative from a number of portals visit your office to present their case, and to ask them for specific, recent statistics.

Here’s some points to consider when choosing a portal:

- Look at where your competitors are advertising and decide whether you want to join them or try another tactic (and portal) to beat them.
- Listen to your customers. If they are continuously asking to have their properties advertised on particular sites, don’t ignore them.
- Consider the best value proposition from each portal in terms of cost of subscription versus the package you’re offered. This includes the number of visitors to the site, the amount of consumer promotion the site does, the reports and analytics the site gives its subscribers, and the extra advertising options available to you on each site that could help you trump your competitors. The most expensive subscription might be expensive because it offers far more than the others, but it may not.
- Think about your market carefully and consider whether a niche portal might actually suit your business better, for example if you specialise in executive leasings or holiday properties. Smaller, niche portals can offer better customer targeting.
- Take a trial run on a number of portals over the same period of time, advertising the same properties, and compare the results. This will give you a real apples-with-apples comparison.
- A good rule of thumb is that you advertise on the dominant player in your market, if only because you can’t afford not to be there. They’re usually dominant for a reason. You should, however, consider how you advertise on this site, possibly choosing a premium listing package to ensure you stand out from your competitors.

The next step is to evaluate all the other potential sites in the mix and probably choose one or two others that suit your needs. It may be a niche site or a key second-tier site that your customers keep asking for. Whilst breadth of coverage is important, it’s also necessary to consider depth of advertising – with only a limited amount of funds available, you’re often better off as a premium subscriber on two or three sites than a standard subscriber, getting lost amongst the rabble, on four or five.

As with any form of advertising, it’s important to be where people are looking and ensure your choices continue to make sense – what worked last year may not be as effective this year. So make sure you choose sites that are attracting the sort of buyers and sellers you want and can demonstrate success in your area with similar types of businesses to your own.

Once you are up and running on a portal, you should continuously monitor how you are tracking, reviewing your statistics on a weekly basis. You might be surprised at how well your properties are going on a small niche site versus the larger ones, or you may well be equally annoyed at how few results you are getting from a particular site that you invested a lot of money in. With market fluctuations and results from other forms of advertising in mind, you should be able to assess whether a site is working for you over a reasonable period of time.

Don’t be content to just do what your competitors are doing and advertise where they are. Analyse your marketplace and the portals within it and consider the best match for your business and your customers. The beauty of online advertising is the statistics and monitoring that can be done, so use these tools to make good choices up front and continue to make good choices down the track.

Finally, don’t be afraid to ask for case studies and comparative statistics, but be mindful of how they’re presented – some portals are good at twisting the stats to suit their needs! Better still, run trials with your own properties and let the results do the talking.

Looking for Realtors to Test a New Application – ListGlobally

Simon Baker — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 07:13:31 +0000

The team at Classified AdVentures (owners of Property Ad Guru) has been working hard on a new product called ListGlobally. This application allows agents to advertise their listings on market leading property portals around the world.

For example, an agent in the US or Australia can up load a listing and have it appear in the international section of such market leading sites as Rightmove in the UK, Enormo, Immobiliare in Italy, and Immobilienscout24 in Germany. Over the coming months ListGlobally will be adding more partners to its distribution list.

Not only is this a great way to promote your listings to an international audience, it is also a great tool to differentiate yourself from your competitors when marketing to potential sellers.

If you would like to be a guinea pig and help us test the application for free, just go to www.listglobally.com and click the link on the home page to register for a free trial. Once we receive your request, we will be in touch via email with your login details.

Seven Portals the Minimum: home.co.uk

Alice Allan — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 21:36:56 +0000

The results of a survey from home.co.uk, a UK-based property search engine, show some interesting trends in the listing habits of UK agencies.

home.co.uk surveyed 14,660 agencies to come up with the results, which show 93 percent of respondents list their properties on at least one portal. However, just over 20 percent of respondents were found to advertise on only one portal. Which was the most popular portal? You guessed it: rightmove.co.uk.

home.co.uk isn’t convinced these agencies have the best online marketing strategy. The search engine had this to say about the importance of advertising on multiple portals:

“Does it mater how many property portals an agent advertises on? Yes indeed it does. Further analysis by home.co.uk shows that the agents that advertise most widely have by far the lowest typical time on market figures. Hence, just being on rightmove.co.uk isn’t enough to have the best property sales turnover.”

The survey also revealed that nearly seven percent of UK agencies don’t advertise online at all.

home.co.uk maintains that the best sales turnover rates are seen by agencies that advertise on seven or more of the major UK property portals. According to the survey, agencies that follow this strategy see properties on the books for 56 fewer days than agencies that advertise on less than seven portals.

“As we’ve being saying time and time again, agents really need to consider reach when planning their online advertising campaigns. More portals equals greater reach and a much faster sales turnover,” said Doug Shephard, business development director at home.co.uk. “Moreover, prospective vendors can easily find how widely an agent advertises online and this encourages more instructions.”

According to home.co.uk, the top five portals in terms of sales are rightmove.co.uk, zoopla.co.uk, primelocation.com, findaproperty.com and fish4.co.uk.

Google Real Estate – Should Agents Bank On It?

Simon Baker — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 03:57:04 +0000

The news just over a week ago that Google was “entering” the UK/European market has sent the share prices of Rightmove and Seloger into a tailspin. Seloger dropped by 9% while Rightmove has plummeted a whopping 17%. Seloger has since recovered to its pre-news price while Rightmove continues to be significantly down.

So let’s look at what happened, will the property portal landscape change and is this impact on the share prices is justified.

An article by the Financial Times (Dec 2 titled “Google set to enter UK property market”) seems to have set the cat amongst the pigeons. The article stated that Google is in talks with British estate agents and that “experts” say that an entry by them to the market could pose a serious threat to existing property websites. The article didn’t talk about what Google was going to do and Google didn’t comment. So there is really not much to go on. So the only guide we really have as to what Google may do in the UK and Europe is what they have done in Australia.

Google “entered” the Australian market 6 months ago (July 2009) when they made it possible for agents, brokers, franchise groups, and portal sites to place their listings on Google Maps. When a user does a search on Google Maps (not the main Google search) for real estate, Google plots the houses in its database on the maps and users can then click on the various dots to see if they like the houses and then are driven back to the advertiser’s site.

At that time, there was a similar uproar and many were predicting the death of realestate.com.au and domain.com.au and the REA Group share price dropped nearly 7% from $5.90 to $5.50. However in the 6 months since the announcement by Google, the REA Group share price has increased 60% to $8.84, the traffic to the site has increased from 4.5m UB’s in June 09 to 5.4m UB’s in October and analysts are predicting an additional 20% revenue growth for the REA Group in FY 2010.

In August, PropertyPortalWatch wrote about the challenges for Google knocking over the market leaders. Here is the link to the article called “The Challenges for Google Real Estate”. All of these still hold true.

Many hope that Google will be the saviour from the “big bad” commercial property portals and deliver free marketing to the agents. However this is a simplistic view and underestimates the challenges Google faces. The challenges include gaining enough listings, maintaining their quality, driving traffic to the maps area, and ensuring the interface is attractive to consumers.

Even if Google is successful in addressing the above, they will only be delivering clicks to the agent’s site not email leads. The agents will need to invest more in higher quality sites to convert the clicks to leads. This, of course, comes at a cost. The old adage holds true, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

It will be interesting times and if I was an agent, I would be putting my listings on Google. However, any clicks I get from Google should be supplemental to my existing online marketing strategy and not replacing my use of established portal sites.

Top 10 Tips for Choosing a Property Portal

Emma Sorensen — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 03:14:33 +0000

There are literally hundreds and thousands of property portals around the world and as an agent or broker you need to choose which ones to advertise on.

So what should you take into account when parting with your precious advertising and marketing budget?

Here are propertyadguru.com’s Top 10 Tips for Choosing a Property Portal:

1. Always consider advertising on the dominant player in your market, if only because you might not be able to afford NOT to be there. But give careful consideration to how you advertise, do you need to stand out or are you happy to be one of the crowd?

2. Look at where your competitors are advertising. Do you want to join them or try another tactic (and portal) to beat them?

3. Listen to your customers. If they are continuously asking to have their properties advertised on particular sites, don’t ignore them.

4. Don’t lose sight of value. Consider each portal in terms of cost of subscription versus the package you’re offered. Take into account: web traffic (number of unique visitors to the site and page views) any marketing the portal does; the reports and analytics the site gives its subscribers; and the extra advertising options available to you on each site that could help you trump your competitors. The most expensive might not always be the best.

5. Understand your market. Would a niche property portal suit the property you’re advertising best? There are niche portals for executive leasings, prestige properties, holiday rentals, and student accommodation, which can often offer you the chance to better target any potential customers.

6. Trial several portals. Take a trial run on a number of portals over the same period of time, advertising the same properties, and compare the results. Don’t succumb to marketing hype and wild sales promises. Ask for facts and figures to be supplied, and understand what they mean (read our article about understanding the stats). If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is, so test it out first.

7. Breadth versus depth. Whilst breadth of coverage is important, it’s also necessary to consider depth of advertising. With a limited budget available you’d be better off being a premium subscriber on 2-3 sites than a standard subscriber, getting lost amongst the rabble, on 4-5 sites.

8. How easy is it to get your properties onto the portal? You don’t want to spend your days doing data entry (unless it’s a rare one-off for a particular property). Does the portal offer a data feed?

9. What extra consumer-friendly features does the property portal offer? How many pictures can you load, what about floor plans and virtual tours, and are there maps, driving directions, walk scores, or extra widgets you can add to your own website? Consumers are often attracted by the portal’s add on neighbourhood features.

10. Would you enjoy searching for a property on the portal you’re considering? Never lose sight of the bigger picture: portals should be easy to use, consumer friendly, and attractive. If you don’t like using it yourself then a user probably won’t either.

Once you are up and running on a portal you should continuously monitor how you are tracking on that site, reviewing your statistics on a weekly basis.

[image: flick/the_toe_stubber]

Top 50 Overseas Property Portals

Emma Sorensen — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 21:49:02 +0000

After its recent revamp, independent UK trade portal globaledge.co.uk has revealed the latest top 50 overseas property portal rankings.

Many estate agents look to this rankings list and the information it provides on pricing and google rankings as a guide – where should they spend their advertising budgets?

In this market leads are hard to come by, and globaledge.co.uk has issued some valuable advice for agents with the rankings list:

“If you look down this list and simply choose the cheapest portals, you will NOT maximise the number of leads you generate. The trick to finding property portals that work for your business is to find those that your customers are likely to use.”

Criteria agents should consider includes: marketing and traffic, content and usability, and business model.

After a survey of 535 locations, globaledge.co.uk has ranked the top five overseas portals as:

1. themovechannel.com
2. findaproperty.com
3. hotprop.com
4. rightmove.co.uk
5. leadgalaxy.com (venture.co.uk)

The bulk of the information is only available to premium subscribers of globaledge.co.uk. Further information about the methodology behind the rankings is available at the website.

Dont Be Baffled by Stats

Simon Baker — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 04:10:14 +0000

Portal sites around the world use a range of statistics when marketing themselves to agents. However, these stats are always large and often mean nothing. The real question is, what information should an agent be asking for when looking at which portal to use?

Stats Explained

Portal sites bombard agents with a range of stats – each one bigger than the previous – and all designed to show why they are the biggest and the best site to advertise on. However, most of these stats are meaningless and dont actually tell the agent what they need to know. Here are some of the more popular stats put out by portal sites around the world.

Hits – now this has to be THE most meaningless statistic. It count how many times the server is “hit” when presenting a page to the user. Therefore two pages that look the same but are constructed differently will generate different numbers of hits. If you are quoted hits by a portal site – they probably dont have much to offer.

Page Impressions – this measures the number of page impressions or pages of information users look at – usually over the course of a month. For large sites these numbers can be massive – e.g. realestate.com.au had 528 million in August 2008. While a massive number, it doesnt mean much to the agent in one suburb.

Sessions or Visits – this measures the number of times someone visits the website – no matter what page they land on. This will also be a massive number and also not tell you, the agent, much about whether you should advertise on the site.

Frequency – this tells us the number of times, on average, a person visits a site and therefore gives you an idea of the popularity of the site. For example, a person who visits a site 3 times per month has a frequency of 3 and generates 3 visits. Sites with low frequencies (say <1.5 times per month) are usually generating traffic from SEO or SEM and that traffic is hitting the site and bouncing off. realestate.com.au, for example, has a frequency of just over 3 inicating the it has significant loyal traffic.

Unique Visitors or Unqiue Browsers – this attempts to measure the number of individuals that visit a site each month. Now this is probably not a true measure as it is calculated based on cookies and often people delete their cookies and therefore can measure the same person as being multiple people. Still, UV’s are as good a measure as you can get online.

Average Session Duration – this tells us how long a person stays on the site each time they visit. The longer the session time, the more properties they are looking at. Sites such as realestate.com.au have session times of nearly 10 minutes – this is massive and normally sites have session times of around 3 – 5 min.

Leads Generated – sites often attempt to calculate how many leads they generate. Now the reality is that they can measure how many emails are sent from the site to the agents and in some countries they can measure the number of phone calls they generate. However, they can not measure how many people visit the estate agent or just turn up at an open for inspection.

Detailed Property Views – when a user does a search on a property site, they generate search results and then click on the houses they like to see the property in detail – this is a detailed property view.

Stats the Matter

While all of the above are interesting, that is MOST important to an agent is what is happening in their suburb. Therefore all these stats about how well a portal site is performing at a global level is really useless to an agent as you want to know how well each site performs in your suburb.

Now the portals probably dont have this information or wont share it with you. However the stats you want to try to get a hold of are:

Searches Per Suburb – this is how many times a visitor to the site does a search on a particular suburb – the more that a suburb is searched, the more potential leads can be generated

Leads Per Suburb – this tells you how many emails and, if possible, how many telephone calls are generate on a suburb by suburb basis.

Leads Per Listing – this tells you how many emails (and calls) you are likely to receive for a particular listing in a particluar suburb

These are the measures that will help you work out how effective your advertising is on a particular portal site and allow you to compare how effective each portal site is in your suburb.

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