Zoomf Blog - UK Property Blog.

It’s a topic that’s understandably close to our hearts and as a search engine we see ourselves as the eventual winners in this battle for online house-hunters hearts and minds. But people get stuck in their ways. We use the same brand of toothpaste for decades because it’s just ‘what we do’. This can be a real point of frustration for us when we’re talking to agents who don’t want to put the time into reconsidering their online marketing, they could often be getting a better return for a lot less money by turning their attention away from the portals and towards the search engines. But now that agency budgets across the country are tightening, the case of the online marketing budget has come to the foreground for many. It was certainly a point of debate in this fortnight’s edition of The Negotiator (released 21st March), the popular magazine written exclusively for agents.

Unfortunately, The Negotiator doesn’t publish articles online but anyone with a paper copy can flick to pages 17 and 18 for an in-depth look at the portals and the search engines and details of which sites can give you the most bang for your buck. There’s some pretty interesting stats, the savings that could be made by shuffling your online alliances were substantial. I work for Zoomf and even I was surprised!

The Negotiator found that an agency with ten offices who currently subscribe to the two main portals, Rightmove and Primelocation, could save just under £100,000 per year by switching over to Zoomf and buying 30 keywords, and that’s not a saving to laugh at! It wasn’t just the big agencies that stood to save a fortune either, a five office agency was estimated to be able to save £45,000 per year and a single office agency with 10 keywords could drastically reduce their online marketing budget by 85%! Gosh. If you’d like more details about our clever targeted advertising then you can contact greg@zoomf.com for an overview.

And whilst we’re on the topic of online advertising, we’re currently getting very excited about our next seminar for agents. We’ve got a new venue, Interbrand on The Strand, and it will be taking place on the 24th of April at 6.30pm. Along with the usual Zoomf experts there will be presentations from Oodle and Yell, and of course the opportunity for you to have all your questions answered. We’ll be discussing Google AdWords, targeted advertising and all sorts of lovely things to do with online marketing on a tight budget. It’s free to attend, but places have been snapped up impressively quickly, so make sure you email marianna@zoomf.com if you want to guarantee yourself a place!

Technorati Tags: Real estate, Property, Online Advertising, Portals

Sounds like the name of the latest summer blockbuster, I envisage Zoomf being some sort of crazy alien that Sigourney Weaver spends 90 minutes trying to decapitate. But it’s not a movie, it’s just us announcing the latest redesign here at Zoomf towers.

Every third post I seem to be announcing some sort of new feature, but this redesign is the most significant in a while. New bits and pieces are being added as we speak so we’ll do a proper round up of the new features once they’re all in place. But please, if this post is coming to you in your reader, come and have a look at what we’ve done so far! We’ve got a new homepage, results page and details page. Visual Search has taken a short holiday but will be back very soon with a vengeance, and the tech team are currently ironing out some minor glitches but all in all we’re very proud of the new look. Very Spring/Summer 2008.

Technorati Tags: Zoomf, Real Estate, Property

Part of me feels like the only reason I started studying Economics was because one day I wanted to be the girl who held up that dashing red briefcase. Now, not so much. Who wants a handbag which you can only take out once a year? Well today the red case was proudly displayed, Alistair Darling’s first Budget was never going to be terribly exciting. The main highlights being an increase of 4p on every pint of beer, 14p on a bottle of wine and 55p on each bottle of spirits. A pack of 20 ciggies are going to set you back an extra 11p too. So those that love their booze and fags will be grumbling, which they inevitably always are this time of year. Anyone with a car is also likely to be less than pleased with Darling’s increase in road tax and the (delayed) increase in fuel duty by 2p.

So what did he have to say about property?

Nurses, teachers and other key workers will benefit from being able to borrow money from shared equity schemes and stamp duty on shared ownership homes will not be required until people own 80% of the property. Good news for these groups, but no real relief for the hundreds of thousands of other first time buyers who may have been hoping for some sort of break in this years budget. That being said, more people will be given the chance to have a long-term, low-risk fixed mortgage. But whether or not that will be seen as a particularly attractive offer is yet to be seen.

As for new homes, sites for 70,000 new properties have been identified and there will be an extra £26billion worth of funding pumped into greener homes next year.

And they were the only real property highlights really. If you want excitement and feel like the Budget hasn’t quite tickled your fancy, then stay tuned here at Zoomf over the next couple of days. Big changes are imminent!

Technorati Tags: Property, Real Estate, Budget

It doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as the famous ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ phrase, but it seems that we are being a little bit prejudiced when it comes to house-hunting.

It can be very distracting to be viewing a house with horrifically ugly furniture, and some people will need the agent to keep reminding them that the heinous floral sofa won’t be there if they choose to move in. On the other side of the coin there are the super DIYers that have mastered the art of walking into a house with molding bathroom walls and seeing a luxury Jerusalem stone wet-room with a built-in waterproof TV.

Whoever you are, the likelihood is that you don’t want to devote your life into making a grubby home a gorgeous home, most want to find a house that doesn’t need anything major reworking but is ready to have a few personal touches added.

So it stuns me that a survey by HotProperty has found that 1/3 of people would be put off making an offer on a property with a pink front door. Purple, grey, orange and yellow were also found to be offensive front door colours. The colour of a front door is certainly important for creating the right image of the property from the outside, but a deal breaker? Surely not.

To those people who have found the home of their dreams, and are being put off making an offer because of the colour of the front door, you may be interested in this article that clearly takes you through how to repaint the door yourself. Yes you may have to give up your Sunday afternoon and get a bit messy, but £25 on a tin of paint is probably less costly than losing your perfect pad.

And if your house has been hanging around on the market a bit longer than you anticipated, then maybe you should consider repainting your door to please prospective buyers. The survey has found that the majority of people prefer a nice white front door.

Doesn’t matter if you’re black or white? I’m afraid it does if you’re a door Michael.

Technorati Tags: Property, Real Estate, DIY