Words: Ashley Rigg
Published: 16/06/2009
10 million property listings and counting
It’s been quite a year for Yannick Laclau. Since we last met 14 months ago, his portal
Enormo.com has added 7.5 million property listings and nearly 3 million monthly unique users. With 10 million listings, Enormo.com is now the world’s largest real estate website. I caught up with Yannick to find out how he’s done it.
Ashley Rigg: Hi Yannick, good to talk to you again. How’s business?
Yannick Laclau: Pretty good considering the state of the market. We’ve grown significantly over the past year and we now have 81 sites in 31 languages.
AR: But are you making any money?
YL: We are very much on target to deliver what we’re expected to both in terms of revenue and visitor numbers.
AR: That’s a diplomatic answer. I can understand you don’t want to mention specifics but did you change from the freemium model because you weren’t making enough money?
YL: We started off with a free model. In the beginning it was about proving the concept and the technology and building scale. We trialed a number of different business models and we settled on a subscription model. Agents can reach millions of potential customers in 85 countries for a small fee and it is easy to budget for.
AR: How much is it?
YL: Prices start at €99 a month and it includes translation of your property listings into 28 languages.
AR: I’ve always been a little intrigued by this. If I’m an agent selling Spanish property and I receive a Polish lead from you and they only speak Polish how can I make a sale?
YL: It’s actually less of problem than you might think. People looking for properties across borders tend to have passable second language skills, most often English, Spanish, French or Portuguese. Besides we also have a way of up-weighting our listings in favour of agents that have the right language skills.
AR: How does that work?
YL: The algorithm looks at the agents profile and whether they have chosen to translate the full description into that language and gives a little extra weight to those listings. It means buyers find agents who can better meet their needs and agents who are more pro-active get more leads. It works well.
AR: That’s interesting. So how much of your traffic comes from your non-English language sites?
YL: The majority. Our traffic is extremely dispersed geographically. We’ve recently seen a rise in user numbers from places as far afield as Russia, Eastern Europe, Philippines, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina.
AR: Where are the areas where you are weakest?
YL: With 8 million sales and 2 million rental listings, our coverage of the globe is very good. We have listings in every country where we want them. The challenge for us is improving the depth of our content.
AR: How big is the market? How many property listings is it realistic to have?
YL: That’s a good question. There are no reliable figures but internally we put the figure at around 15 million properties for sale on the market at any one time. The rental market is obviously much bigger.
AR: I was pretty surprised when your PR team sent me your Google Analytics figures recently. Four million unique visitors a month across your network. That’s quite an increase since last time we spoke.
YL: What you saw was a peak figure. It varies between two and just over four million depending on the month. We’ve seen a slight dip recently.
AR: So how have you done it? What have been your best performing marketing channels and tactics?
YL: Our marketing tends to be very focused on the needs of our clients. Unlike a national portal we cannot undertake national campaigns so we have to be very targeted.
AR: So you target your search marketing to the areas where your paying clients have property. Isn’t that something that most portals do?
YL: It’s one of the things we do, but I really can’t say anymore about our marketing techniques as they are key source of our competitive advantage.
AR: Local SEO, affiliates and PR must be the lion’s share of it?
YL: I really can’t say.
AR: OK, fair enough. What marketing advice would you give to agents then? Any tips you can share?
YL: First of all only do internet marketing. We’ve built our traffic almost entirely this way. If I were an agent I’d use search marketing and I’d also pick a selection of international, national and specialist portals that have a good audience profile and allocate a fixed cost a month as part of my marketing budget.
AR: There’s a lot of hype at the moment, particularly in the US around social media. Do you think that sites like Twitter offer lead generation opportunities for overseas agents?
YL: The big difference with agents in the US is the MLS so everyone has access to everyone else’s listings and there is no exclusivity. You need to build a personal brand to compete. People pick you because they like you and know you. Building your network is very suited to sites like Twitter. In the UK and in many other European countries though I’m not sure vendors care so much about an agents network. It’s more about who has the biggest local marketing budget and best store positions.
AR: How about for overseas agents serving the investor segment. Isn’t Twitter a good tool for keeping in touch with repeat buyers and offering good deals?
YL: It is more applicable here but agents already have email to do this.
AR: Ultimately I suppose you need to go where your customers are and interact with them on their terms. Open rates for emails are falling as people struggle to deal with information over-load. Twitter is becoming very popular and
its demographics are quite good for the overseas property market. I think done well; it has a place in the marketing mix in terms of building word of mouth and also for customer retention.
YL: True, but the key is having a clear strategy and knowing what you want to achieve. It’s not going to generate the sort of instance response you can get from other online channels. Certainly at the moment.
AR: I agree. Let’s finish off by getting your view of the overseas property market. Where’s the best place to be buying and selling property right now?
YL: It’s difficult as the crisis is truly global. All markets are suffering with low transaction volumes. There is too much of a gap between what sellers expect and what buyers will pay and this isn’t going to go away any time soon particularly in places like Spain and the UK. Markets need to fall much further. The best place to be selling property right now is arguably the US. Prices have fallen 50% to 60% in many areas and the market is nearing the bottom. The investor, cash-buyer market is strong in many areas. In Spain, the banks are now the country’s biggest estate agents. I think repossessions and distressed property sales will make up a large chunk of the market so some time to come.
AR: Yannick, thanks for your time, good to catch-up.
YL: Pleasure, speak to you soon.
About Enormo
Enormo is the world’s largest international real estate website, displaying over 10 million listings (sale and rent) in more than 80 countries. Enormo currently has user traffic of 4.5 million visits a month from potential homebuyers, tenants and investors worldwide and was recently ranked 9th Most Visited Real Estate Site in the world by independent auditors comScore (the only international portal in the Top Ten list).
Enormo’s international marketplace gives targeted online marketing to real estate professionals with property anywhere in the world. The site has recently added foreclosure listings from US leaders RealtyTrac, launched a section to showcase developments to cross-border investors, and has announced advertising agreements with large media groups NCI and Homes & Land in the US, as well as partnerships with agent networks across Europe.
Advertiser Message
Property Portal Feeder
feeds properties to more than 40 international property portals, saving
you time and money. Add your property once and the system does the rest.
User Comments
Hi David,
Thanks for taking the time to post a comment. To reply to your points:
1- This is just your assumption, probably based on you typing by yourself a few phrases into google and drawing a general conclusion. That you've made this statement, I can assure you shows you don't really know what you're talking about!
2- Our site navigation is what it is, you're entitled to your opinion. But you're wrong about our business model- read the interview on this very page to learn more. You shouldn't assume on seeing adsense that it's automatically the main business model of a website- it's not true for the New York Times, for eBay, for thousands of companies and the same is true for us.
3- Thanks for the business model advice!
Best,
Yannick
Yannick Laclau,
Enormo
Mr Laclau,
1. Your search engine rankings appear to be poor, both locally, nationally or indeed internationally.
2. Your site is difficult to navigate and contains many competitive adverts in the form of Google adsenses et al. This only serves to confuse visitors in which is essentially a Google adsense business model.
3. You would be better following a business model such as used by www.greenacres.com or specific to a locality like www.french-property-sale.eu.
Regards,
David Seymour,
http.://www.french-property-sale.eu/