Zoomf Blog - UK Property Blog.

Poppy over at Globrix has let us know that Vebra and Globrix have now come to an agreement over data and crawling. That’s good news for agents and good news for Globrix and Vebra, however, it begs the bigger question of data standards and all this ‘charging’ that happens within the property space.

Let me paint a picture for you….

You run a medium-sized agency with 4 offices. You use a leading software provider (like a DezRez or Property Owl or whatever) and you want to list with property portals and property search engines. You would also like to be found within Google and Yahoo.

Portal Scenario

It is perfectly possible that your software vendor charges you (the agent) for sending your data to portals. Sometimes sending your listing feed is part of your software contract and sometimes it is not. It’s also possible that there are charges being agreed between the portal and the software vendor.

Property Search Engines

Property search engines like Zoomf, Globrix and DotHomes will typically collect the listings in an automated fashion right from your website. This is done as a service, typically at night, so as not to increase web traffic to your servers during peak times. The same happens with Google and Yahoo throughout the life of your website. Google and Yahoo come to your website and collect general data in order to deliver your website traffic against what they think your content is about.

The issues from a search engine POV

Search engines are generating traffic to estate agents. They click-thru to your websites providing valuable targeted traffic. Search engines do not charge for this service (crawling, mapping, interfaces) nor do they charge for the ‘free’ aspects of click-traffic. Vebra would never approach a Google or a Yahoo to ‘charge’ them for inclusion so why charge a property search engine? Simply put, they see it as a threat to their business and another way to make incremental revenue. In the Vebra case, I’m sure Thinkproperty comes into the equation as Globrix, Zoomf and others could be seen as competitive threats to the Thinkproperty system which is part of the the same group (Guardian Media) that Vebra is part of.

From an estate agent’s perspective, the goal of hosting my website is to get market leading support and features while driving as much internet exposure as possible. By blocking search engines, Vebra is actually stopping this from happening. That is not in the agent’s interest.

Can you imagine if Vebra told it’s clients that it would be blocking Google and Yahoo from including their content? Something tells me a revolt would be soon in coming.

The issues from a Verba POV

Verba is concerned about crawling affecting their own website performance and obviously any support requirements if ‘feeds’ are setup. Sometimes, bandwidth costs to Vebra could come into play as a concern for crawling. These are definitely valid concerns and something that should be part and parcel of the discussions and due diligence of the technology behind the new property search engines.

the Compromise

Agreements will be made and that is clear. Most of the new Web 2.0 entrants are happy to be in a co-opetition environment.

Bigger Picture

Feeds need to be standardized. If the portals, software vendors and search engines all got together (like the US does) and agreed to data standards and ways in which to improve data transfer on the internet (XML, Ping servers, microformats, etc) , I would predict a lot less time and resource would be spent by all those people who have to support the thousands of feed mechanisms that plague this industry and are being sent across the web on a daily basis.

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Active Rain has launched a very interesting pay per click product called Listing Router. Active Rain is arguably the biggest social network for real estate agents in the USA. You can think of Active Rain as the best parts of Facebook but with a professional twist like LinkedIn.

Anyway, within the internet space, people are very curious as to how social networks will best serve advertisers. Active Rain is attempting to crack this problem with it’s new Listing Router service for a property social network. We’ll be watching this space to see how it evolves.

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Just the other day I was inside Google Mail trying to combat my ever increasing inbox when Adsense (Googles text-based ad platform) decided to show me an ad for the ‘GoogleHouse.’

Being curious, I decided to click-thru and see what this was about and ‘lo and behold, it’s a property site. But not just any website, it was a website that had one purpose; to sell one property located up in Highbury.

This is not a new idea to the property space. Various companies have products that build these for you, notably Vflyer, Estate Create (in beta), and Postlets to name but a few. It’s not hard or costly to get a web designer, buy a domain and then put up your brochure. Then you buy some targeted traffic from the likes of Google and Yahoo and watch the leads come in.

We just wonder if this is the future of online listings or just another marketing feather for your cap?

It is very clever of this seller to use the name ‘GoogleHouse’ as I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s getting an artificially high click-thru rate due to the ‘attractive’ name. Google obviously doesn’t seem to mind as the ad is approved and running within gmail Interesting times.

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