Words: Ashley Rigg
Published: 17th April 2008
91 per cent of agents put off by property portals
91% of overseas estate agents and property developers
surveyed by Globaledge.co.uk say they are put off listing on multiple property portals because of the time and effort required to do so. The findings suggest many overseas agents are missing out on potential sales leads by listing on fewer portals than they otherwise would, if the process was easier.
Unlike the UK property industry, where estate agents commonly feed to portals through their CRM software provider, overseas agents often have to set up individual feeds themselves or manually input property details into the administration system of the portals they work with. Julian Walker, Director of estate agency Spot Blue, says he doesn’t have the time to manually upload properties. “We’ve listed with
Lead Galaxy,
The Move Channel and
Homes Overseas because they uploaded the properties for us by scraping our site,” he explains. He is a big fan of the cost-per-lead model but he refuses to list on portals where there is manual work involved.
Nikki Long, proprietor of Sun Property International is less dismissive. “The admin is not too much of a problem when you only have a few developments and list on two or three portals, but it is time consuming and I can see it being a pain as we expand,” she says.
Accuracy issues
When you allow third parties to scrape your website or upload properties on your behalf you can run into problems. Julian says that one of the portals (which he doesn’t name) got the price wrong on one of his properties and he was inundated with enquiries from people who could not afford the property. He also has doubts about how up-to-date his properties are kept, which can result in time-wasting enquiries, he says.
Portal feeding service
Agents who want to list with a number of portals and need greater control over their properties will be interested in a new product called
Property Portal Feeder, launched this week. Agents upload their properties' details once and the service feeds out to a number of property portals. They currently have agreements in place with eight portals including
Rightmove.co.uk,
Primelocation.com,
Kyero,
The Move Channel and
Lead Galaxy and have plans to roll out the service to include many others according to industry demand.
Stuart Sermon, Managing Director of Property Portal Feeder (PPF), says he came up with the idea some time ago but the technical details have taken a while to iron out. “Many agents and developers we have spoken with want to list their properties on multiple portals but don’t have the time or resources to manually upload them to each one. They are also not keen on portals automatically scraping property data from their sites due to bandwidth usage and other negative issues. It’s a simple idea but setting up the feeds and the execution of the service has taken us over six months to perfect.”
Cost benefit analysis
The only potential downside of the new service is the cost. At £49.99 per month for 200 properties, agents will need to weigh up the benefits against the price. Those keen to list with a large number of portals and/or have a lot of properties to sell will be better able to justify the costs.
Stuart is keen to get agents to trial the service. He is offering a “15 months for the price of 12” contract to anyone signing up in April as an initial incentive. Those interested should visit the
website for more information.
User Comments
We upload to allmost all German speaking portals in Germany, Austria, Swiss.
EDI Real software for estate agencies (called in German Maklersoftware EDI Real) is available in many languages.
For further information please contact me at
www.edireal.com
Eduard B.,
EdiReal
Technicweb.com already uploads for us to any portal we want and as far as I know they do this for lots of agents here and overseas.
Robert Tanner,
CPS Lettings
I am surprised that agents have taken so long to realise the heavy costs of portal advertising. The same applies to print advertising when over 70% of consumers look for property online. Agents can of course list on on of the free property search engines line zoomf.com and use advertising where and when they want to, to boost leads.
Rod Dowler,
Arclight Media Technology