Words: Ashley Rigg
Published: 3rd April 2008
The Properazzi interview
Yannick Laclau knows what it feels like to fail. The first company he set up in the dotcom boom in 2000 ran into financial problems and he had to return to consultancy work to make ends meet. Eight years later, he’s running a team of 20 people on one of the most exciting real estate portals in the world, as CEO of
Properazzi.
Properazzi currently lists 2.5 million properties for sale globally, and have the ambitious aim of listing every property for sale on the planet. Yannick puts this figure at 10 million properties at any one time. The mission is to become the “global platform for real estate” and much like Google, to be the gateway to the web but for a specific niche: international property.
So what kind of traffic numbers will represent success? Current monthly unique users stand at 750,000 but he is unwilling to predict how high it will go. “Most property searches are localised and focused on domestic purchase. We are growing the market, so it’s hard to tell where user numbers will end up,” he says.
An international perspective
Yannick has lived in the UK, Spain, US and Latin America and speaks four languages. The idea for the business came from his experience building websites for Spanish estate agents selling to UK buyers on the costas. “Agents only really had access to local [marketing] channels and they wanted a broader international reach at low effort and low cost,” he explains. He used his technical skills to help his clients upload to third-party sites and thought he could do a better job aggregating information. He took his plan to Mangrove Capital Partners (who backed Skype) and 12 months of intensive development work later, he launched Properazzi.
The economics of free
Agents can list properties on the website free of charge and most of their first year has been spent building scale with this business model. Yannick is not keen to discuss financials publicly but it’s clear from our conversation that Properazzi is some way from break-even. The main revenue stream comes from sponsored listings which appear above free properties. Agents are offered a range of pay-per-performance options, the most common of which is pay per click. Agents can buy “click bundles” which provide clicks to the property details on an agent’s site. “Click prices are significantly less than those on Google,” claims Yannick. “Traffic should also be more qualified, as the people clicking will have viewed a description and photograph of the agent’s property rather than just a text ad.”
Marketing to 6.6 billion people
There are
a lot of people in the world and I put it to him that reaching them through PR and search alone will be very difficult. “International buyers are different,” he remarks, pointing out that “most international buyers will start their search using a search engine rather than using domestic portals with international listings”. The implication is that Properazzi can pick up a lot of this traffic through their SEO and paid search efforts. They haven’t performed that well to date on Google UK according to
our figures but they attract lots of blog links and have a newsworthy product which will give them a significant competitive advantage in the SEO game in future.
Can they build the kind the global awareness needed for a significant number of users to bypass search engines and come direct? Yannick acknowledges this will be difficult but says he’s pleased so far with the number of returning visitors and direct traffic they receive.
An international audience
Properazzi translate their site into 15 languages in addition to English. Although only 12% of traffic comes from the UK, 38% over all visitors use the English language site. “Many people in a position to buy international property – investors and expats, for example – have excellent language skills and are comfortable searching in English,” says Yannick. However, the large proportion of non-English searching visitors suggests the site provides access to buyers in lucrative international markets like
Northern Europe.
Most new portals will fail
Yannick predicts that “a lot of the recent real estate 2.0 start-ups won’t be around in a few years time. Most new businesses fail and real estate is no different, the key to success is focus…focusing on one thing that you are really good at and can become famous for”. He particularly admires Zillow, which has become synonymous with home valuation in the US, and Trulia, which he says is strongly associated with the concept of search in the States.
Traction on a budget
I make
the point made by Simon Baker recently that the new wave of portals will make less money than the first, which will reduce marketing budgets and therefore lead generation capabilities. He points out that “you don’t always need huge marketing budgets if you have a strong market position and business focus. The success of Zillow and Trulia in the US are certainly evidence that it can be done."
Properazzi's global positioning is both their greatest strength and biggest weakness. They have more properties for sale than anyone else but their geographical diversity makes the marketing challenge that much more difficult. Can they become the Google for overseas property? It’s a possibility, but in many ways it doesn’t matter to trade readers. It’s free (or cheap, depending on the option you take), easy to list on and provides access to 750,000 unique visitors, many of whom you can’t reach through other channels. Not a bad start as they approach their first birthday.
User Comments
I have looked at Properazzi site in detail after reading the interview.
With such a big site and with international backing, I would have though the they would have got the basics correct!
All of the properties featured on the Properazzi website by Villarenters.com are advertised as monthly prices when in actual fact Villarenters prices are all per week not per month as they are a holiday company.
And also the properties that are advertised in Vaillamartin, Alicante are advertised as being in Andalucia.
How can Properazzi expect to become “global platform for real estate” when they cannot get the basics correct.
Looks like poor planning and lack of geographical experience to me!
John Treagust
CostaBlancaLive.co.uk
+ 34 966 193 845
JOHN TREAGUST,
www.CostaBlanaLive.co.uk / .es