October 2007

Portals — the battle hots up!

FOR some time now, the Portal marketplace has been dominated by Rightmove with Prime Location, FindaProperty and Propertyfinder all chasing second spot.

Fish4homes have lost their top-level status but we have seen challengers coming in and Think Property and Hot Property are the new ones.

It was however slightly surprising to see a press release from Think Property at the beginning of September claiming that they had just moved into fourth place on the ratings of internet intelligence service Hitwise and I felt I had to investigate further.

Of course the claim — coming from such a reputable company as Think Property — was true, but it is interesting to see how internet activity can be stimulated and I would be very interested to hear if you agents noticed any difference in the resulting inquiries at office level.

During the last two weeks of August, Think Property ran a banner advertising campaign called ‘treasure hunt’ on some specific sites including the social network sites bebo.com and myspace.com as well as multimap.co.uk.

The campaign was enormously successful and increased Think Property’s share of the market from some 1.4 per cent to 5.2 per cent, according to Hitwise.

The graph below shows a comparison with Prime Location and FindaProperty. This however also shows the first two weeks in September. In the first week when Think Property say they dropped the banner advertising their share plummeted back to original levels but as the banners kick in, in the second week it goes back up to 3.86 per cent.

These results, on the face of it, show the campaigns to be effective but one also needs to look at other statistics to question the real benefits for the agent.

Firstly the time spent by visitors on the site was diminished from some six to seven minutes to less than two — 1.54 minutes to be precise.

Followers of my portal statistics comparison will be aware that time on site is one of the statistics I record as it gives an indication of whether a visitor is actually using the site or just browsing and moving on.

Apparently it took about one minute to complete the competition and so many of the visitors may not have actually gone further than that, although Think Property do claim that 110,000 additional visitors looked at an additional 960,000 properties.

In comparison, the ‘normal’ time on site recorded in the portal survey is 10 minutes and in May Propertyfinder reported 14 minutes and Rightmove 22 minutes. All of these are considerably more than 1.54 minutes.

Time on site can be manipulated by the construction of the site and the way in which it is used — Rightmove keep people on the site but others provide links to agents and allow users to browse into other sites.

Think Property seem to have recognised this issue and in their new advertising banner campaign ‘House Price Challenge’ they state that one of the objectives is to encourage people to stay on the site longer .

I quote: “The aim of the campaign is to promote thinkproperty.com to new users and increase the dwell time on the site.

“This will be done through a House Price Challenge competition which asks users to guess the price a dream house sold for in 2005, by using the sold house price data on thinkproperty.com as a clue.”

The second interesting factor is the source of entry into the site — it is known as the upstream traffic.

The following chart (above, right) shows the impact of the sites on which the banner adverts were placed.

The traffic generated by google decreased from a norm of about 30 per cent to nearer 12 per cent — probably due to a decrease in spend on Google ads.

And this has been significantly replaced by traffic from Multimap with a peak of traffic coming from bebo.com and myspace.com at the end of August and rising traffic coming from the internet movies site imdb.com.

Think Property are certainly not standing still and they continue to develop in many different areas.

They have introduced web 2.0 mapping to their site with the ability to overlay mainline railway stations, hospitals, state and independent primary and secondary schools.

Users have the option to check boxes to choose what information they want.

Some of the aggregating sites like Nestoria have been showing this web 2.0 data for a little while.

They have chosen to show additional lifestyle information such as pubs, restaurants and supermarkets and I would expect these features to be available on Think Property in the not too distant future.

I carried out some research earlier in the year and there is no doubt that these facilities are attractive to users so for the time being Think Property have stolen a march on their major competitors.

They have also attracted two of the bigger agency chains to the network.

Chancellors with 50 branches and the Belvoir lettings group with 117 branches have signed up, although Belvoir can only recommend their offices to join because of the nature of the franchise setup.

Colin Pink, Chancellors’ commercial director, has made the commitment.

At present he is quoted as saying: “We are delighted to be uploading our properties on to thinkproperty.com. We believe that thinkproperty.com will provide great exposure for our stock.”

He is of course a realist and as one would expect with Chancellors he has negotiated a ‘favourable deal’ for an initial 12 month period. It will be interesting to monitor the response they receive over the next 12 months.

While Think Property are using the internet to increase traffic, Prime Location are continuing with more conventional means with a 30 second TV ad aimed at the house buying and selling public.

Prime Location attribute their rise to a fairly consistent second place in the Portal rankings to the increased traffic that TV has brought them — and the additional visits and instructions to their member agents.

Fish4 have made all their sites available to mobile phone users through the purpose-built site http://mobile.fish4.co.uk, which can be accessed via XHTML on most mobile phones.

Detailed searches, access to photos and direct contact with the agents can all be enabled.

In these high speed days, it allows users away from their computer to keep in touch with what is coming onto the market.

Personally I cannot quite see why one needs to have the information so quickly but it is the way of the world and I am sure that some of the younger generation will find it useful.

Please let me know if you are now receiving inquiries this way!