Words: Ashley Rigg
Published: 22nd May 2008
Leads for 3 euros? Kyero.com’s Martin Dell talks to Globaledge.co.uk
Martin Dell has achieved a lot since leaving school at 16. As well as taking leading technical roles at AT&T and Northern Telecom, he's worked at a senior level in sales and marketing for Motorola and British Telecom. However, he owes his greatest success - the development of Kyero.com - to his son, Chris, who developed the site to assist with his job search in 2003.
2003 is a long time ago in internet years. The competition was less intense then and the site made money almost from day one. “You couldn’t find any Spanish portals [on search engines]…there was a clear need in the market for a Spanish-specific portal aimed at foreign buyers,” he says. Five years later, he’s running a multi-million pound business which is in one of the largest employers in Almunecar, on the
Costa Tropical, Spain.
The cheapest property leads on the internet?
According to Dell, “average lead costs are below €3 each…which is down from €8 per lead in 2007”. He attributes the change to their improved search engine optimisation efforts, which began towards the end of 2007. If the figures are accurate, and I have no reason to doubt him, Kyero could conceivably be the cheapest property lead source on the internet. It’s easy to understand why they
generate such positive feedback. So what are the secrets of their success?
Look after the customer
“Foreign buyers search for property in a totally different way [to domestic purchasers]. It’s about discovery,” explains Dell. “It can take people about a year to 18 months until they are ready to buy. A good country-specific portal can help inform people and get them up to speed.”
To help consumers in their discovery, Kyero have gone out of their way to provide local information. The biggest commercial challenge was the “lack of data…there was no [reliable] market data about house prices…we had to create our own databases of house prices, schools and airports.”
Putting search in its place
It’s safe to say that Kyero is not the most visible property portal on the internet. Even now after its recent improvements, it doesn’t do as well as its rival
ThinkSpain on Google. However, it arguably provides the best content and user experience of any Spanish portal. Consumers obviously love the website, tell their friends about it and keep coming back for more. Search is very important in overseas property marketing but Kyero proves it’s not the be all and end all. It’s consumers that buy property, not search engines.
Waiting for your cat to bark
One of the biggest pieces of advice, Dell would give to website owners, is to invest time in usability. His favourite book on the subject is
“Waiting for you cat to bark”, by Jeffery and Brian Eisenberg. He went to US especially to get advice from the authors of the book. After the consultation, he says, “one small change caused conversion rates to double almost overnight”. I press him for details but unsurprisingly, he’s not letting on.
“Get the basics right before you give us more money”
Throughout our interview, I’m trying to work out the reasons for Martin’s success. What strikes me is his commitment to solving market problems and making life easier and cheaper for agents. When I ask him what advice he’d give to overseas agents in this challenging economic climate, he says, somewhat surprisingly: “Get the basics right before you give us more money”. He believes that many agents can get much more out of Kyero.com than they currently do just by working harder with photographs, “teaser descriptions” and by taking advantage of their point-and-click translation tool to translate their listings into all the different languages they cover.
European ambition
The Kyero team are currently working on technology to “reverse out” their technology into other geographical markets. Portugal is the top priority, followed by France. They won’t just be translated equivalents of Kyero.com, they will be stand-alone, country-specific portals dedicated to helping overseas buyers in their “discovery” of these territories. Making a success of it won’t be as easy for Martin as it was in 2003 but I for one won’t be betting against him.
User Comments
Interesting article, but a quick look on Kyero site shows that a "lead", can be someone that has not even see any of the agent property and simply checked "include similar properties" checkbox on someone else property.
One lead is therefore sent to many agencies, thus lowering the cost but also dividing the probability for each agent to be the one selling the product and multiplying the work to do.
In "Pay per lead" system, price is not the only criteria, quality of leads matters as well.
Benoît Galy,
Immofrance.com