(Updated 27th August 2008)
It has been reported this week that the National Association of Estate Agents in the UK is going to launch a free website in the UK – potentially as soon as September this year. The site will be called propertylive.co.uk. The 10,000 or so members of the association will be able to upload all their for sale and for let listings at no charge.
Now this is not the first free site in the UK with zoomf.com, globrix.com, and dothomes.co.uk (to name a few) all promoting agents listings for free. To date these sites have worked in parallel with the big four – rightmove.co.uk, propertyfinder.com, fIndaproperty.co.uk and primelocation.com. Agents tend to pay to be on one or more of the big four and then also use some of the others for additional leads.
However with the economic down turn in the UK, the interest in searching for property online has decreased as can be seen in the decrease in page views to the top 4 sites – especially rightmove.co.uk. The result is that less page views is likely to mean less leads for advertisers and therefore the paid for sites will find it harder to justify any price increases.
On the other hand, the free sites, such as nestoria.co.uk and globrix.com have experienced good growth in the number of page views that they are generating. Globrix.com (backed by News International) has made good progress since launch in January 2007.
However, to put it all in context, i have compared rightmove.co.uk to globrix.com and nestoria.co.uk, you can see that rightmove.co.uk dominates them both in terms of page views generated for agents.
Therefore, even though propertylive.co.uk is being launched and backed by the NAEA, they will have a very long way to go to make a real impact in the UK market.
Advertising Partner
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I think it boils down to more cost per lead. Agents are now looking more to their cost per lead and realising that regional (i.e. http://www.southernpropertyfinder.com) and web2.0 portals such Globrix tend to provide better ROI. I’ve had agents tell me that RightMove’s cost per lead can be over £40 and I think that’s why independants will start to move away from them.
Ed from Nestoria here,
Comparing pageviews is fairly meaningless. Nestoria and Globrix both link out (ie don’t host their own detail pages). We could double pageviews tomorrow by simply showing half as many results per page and make people click on “next”. Would that help anyone?
The valid metric is cost per lead.
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