Zoomf Blog - UK Property Blog

According to Tech Crunch and comScore, the biggest growth in European internet users is coming from Russia. With the UK property market in free-fall, it is no wonder that looking to buyers from abroad becomes very attractive to agents here in the UK. It’s part of the reason why Zoomf has partnered with one of the leading property engines in the Russian market. More to come on that later.

If you’re an estate agent trying to attract Russian buyers, we’d love to hear about your success so far.

It’s no surprise that online advertising is continuing to grow. In a recent report from Ofcom, online advertising is doing the following -

1. growth of 40% from 2006
2. 2.7 billion spent in 2007 compared with 4.7 billion spent in newspapers
3. online advertising is now bigger than mainstream TV
4. paid search is now 1.6 billion of the 2.7 being the largest share

So what insight can be gained for you as a property professional?

1. Online spend should be balanced in a similar fashion to the bigger trend.
2. More spend is going online because more people are spending time online. There is an old saying in advertising; the money follows the eyeballs. This is true. More internet connections and more time has equated in more spend moving online.
3. Online is cheaper than your traditional media outlets, therefore you will be more efficient in reaching those eyeballs.
4. The future will be online, so why not start understanding how to use it? The time is now.

As it’s taking longer to sell that house and win that instruction, don’t you think it’s worth an hour or two in discovering what the future can hold for you?

Sometimes we write about technology that has nothing to do with property but are examples of how technology is changing the content consumption online. Video is one such category, where the acceleration of platforms like YouTube and Vimeo are changing how people use the internet and how video content is being distributed to the masses. Another video start-up has entered the marketplace which has a very simple use;

enabling you to watch TV live via your computer

The application is called Zattoo and funny enough, the founders of this company come from my alma mater, the University of Michigan. I’ve just installed Zattoo on my mac and it works a treat. You get all the BBC channels and most of the main UK channels without any hick-ups as long as you’re on a broadband connection. The picture quality is great. Well worth the 3 minute registration and install. If you’re traveling in Europe, the application checks where you are and gives you a selection of channels for that country.

And of course, the most important thing is that now we can all watch Location, Location, Location from the comfort of our PCs while we hunt for more property leads on Gumtree. Perfect.

Flickr is one of my favorite online services. If you don’t know what it is, basically it’s one of the biggest photo websites online, owned by Yahoo. I’ve been a customer for over 3 years and it costs be approximately $30/year.

They’ve just released an upgraded web-tool, called an embedded slide-show. It basically allows you to embed a group of photos (or videos) as a slide-show into your own website. It should be interesting to the UK property agent because most of the property websites out there have some type of photo gallery or video gallery of properties.

So my question to you is this: Why are you paying expensive web-development companies to develop something that you should be able to get for free? If the internet teaches us anything about the Web 2.0 movement it is this:

Don’t re-invent the wheel (and pay for that wheel) when you can probably get it straight from the innovators at a much reduced cost.

In this case, that innovator is Flickr and the cost for having your photos in a brilliant photo gallery slide-show just went to 15 pounds per year. Did you pay more for yours? 

Congrats to the guys over at Nestoria on the launch of their German listings engine. Their content partnerships include:

• ImmobilienScout24
• Immonet
• Sueddeutsche.de
• S-Immobilien
• MyImmoWorld
• Kalaydo
• 1a-immobilienmarkt

Well done Ed Freyfogle and co. To have a go, just click here.

Homemove is reporting that the NAEA has named its new memeber website “Property Live.” Peter Bolton King, the chief exec of NAEA, is also announcing that this is a free service and is not meant to compete with Rightmove.

My question to Peter Bolton King is simple….. why bother?

Let me clarify my concerns with the NAEA ’strategy’ as I see it so far…

• Why does the market need another listing website? If it’s not meant to compete with Rightmove, then what is it for ?
• If this traffic gets zero audience (which we suspect it might as I’ve never seen a NAEA website climb the audience ranking reports) then what is the point of a pretty website that no one uses?
• If the NAEA website only has half the properties in the UK listing, then it will probably fail miserably to drive visibility for agents. This is a core PROBLEM for any listing site.  If your numbers are not ‘high’ enough to satiate the consumer thirst for a comprehensive view of the market, they won’t use your service.

Not to rain on the NAEA parade, but if Property Live becomes another ‘listing’ website, I’d be asking how much thought went into the NAEA ‘online’ strategy. We will keep a close eye on this to see where it goes, but like Rightmove, we aren’t holding our breath on this one.

Zoomf and Globrix are free-to-list websites. They also offer ‘paying’ ad products in order to give more visibility and lead generation to estate agents. As an agent, you probably think to yourself (and we’ve been challenged about this many times) the following:

• I don’t get it. If it’s free why would I pay? (the answer, by the way is you get more leads than a non-paying customer. Pay for performance.)
• How are ‘free’ models ever going to compete with pay-to-list ie portals like Rightmove, Property Finder, etc
• Will free-to-list stay in this format ?

Craig Donato, founder and CEO of Oodle has written some interesting posts on the future of free-to-list and his opinion on where it can/will go.

I recommend a read if you still have ‘internal questions’ about why free-to-list is now part of the UK property market, how will it work and where it could be going.