Words: Ashley Rigg
Published: 22nd May 2008
Agents reject “Big 4” portals in favour of smaller players
The majority of overseas agents are reluctant to list on the biggest property portals in favour of cheaper alternatives according to Stuart Sermon, Managing Director of
Property Portal Feeder. Sermon and his team have been canvassing hundreds of overseas agents in an effort to sign up businesses for their new portal feeding service. Although they’ve signed up nearly 50 agents since launching on 17th April, “most agents just don’t seem to want [to list property with] the big players,” he says.
Property Portal Feeder, who currently feed to eight portals, are now looking to more than double that number over the next few months. They will add
PropertyIndex.com,
Property-Abroad.com and
EuropeanProperty.com in the next few weeks and are targeting other portals that have competitive pricing models.
Price objections
To follow up on the findings, we spoke to 15 agents selling overseas property across the world. Ten of them had never tried
Rightmove.co.uk,
FindaProperty.com,
Primelocation.com or
Propertyfinder.com. Price was the most common reason for not testing the so called “Big 4”. Not a statistically valid sample, but strong support for the findings of the
Property Portal Feeder team nonetheless.
Too much choice
With hundreds of overseas property portals currently live on the internet, the sheer volume of choice can be overwhelming. Understandably, the default for many agents is to go for cheap deals, or in some cases not to use portals at all. Annie Temple, Director of
Med Property Shop never pays for portals. “The best portals I have used are
The Move Channel and
Property-Abroad.com. I don’t pay for either, but work with them on split commissions,” she says.
You get what you pay for
It’s not universally true, but generally, the better (in terms of traffic) the portal, the higher the price. Rightmove.co.uk is the most expensive portal on the market by some distance but it also has more UK-based users than anyone else. They may not be the right users for everyone in terms of overseas lead generation but they shouldn’t be dismissed on price alone.
Susan Pelekanou, Managing Director of
Islands Blue, is quite positive about a few of the bigger portals, including Propertyfinder.com and FindaProperty.com. She works with eight portals in total and finds Rightmove.co.uk to be one of the better performers. She says: “It’s very different to a year ago - we now get much better quality leads from Rightmove than Primelocation but it used to be the other way around."
One size does not fit all
Speaking to overseas agents, there seems to be no clear agreement on which portals work best. Finding portals that get relevant traffic is key. In markets where there are strong country-specific portals like in Spain and France, these websites tend to take a significant share of consumer traffic and lead volume.
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Evidence from Gerald Gomis, Managing Director of French agency
Lafayette Immobilier International, supports this. He runs a ten-branch network in the southwest of France and finds the larger generic portals to be less effective than some of the French-specific websites. “We have stopped working with Primelocation as they are too expensive. We still work with Rightmove but they are providing very few leads,” says Gomis. “The best portal is
Green Acres. We get 15 emails a day [from them].”
Think like a customer
It’s a cliché but the best way to pick property portal partners is to try and think like your customers. Ask them which portals they use and use Google to search for property in the areas where you sell. Which portals come up and which ones are the most interesting and useful? You can also view our independent profiles of nearly 50
overseas property portals to help you make a shortlist. If you are short on budget, test the cheapest portals in your shortlist before trying the others but it’s never a good idea to buy on price alone.
Promotion: Upload to 80+ portals for free
Lead Galaxy allows you to:
- Upload to 80+ portals – Free upload, pay per lead
- Email up to 100,000 potential buyers for as little as £0.05 per lead
- Take part in a lead auction to win leads for as little as £2 each
Free sign up here