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.

This past week has had some big announcements from the various players in space. Below is a recap for your reading pleasure.

• Rightmove is slashing staff by 20%. Is this a reaction to the recession or is it the mounting pressure from agents to leave? Some agents have begun to apply pressure using an online petition against the mighty Rightmove.

• Globrix is going to the USA. A UK-based search engine, in a similar move to DotHomes earlier this year, is shouting about it’s US ambitions.

• Propertylive from the NAEA (national association of estate agents) finally went live. We’ve been told with 50k property listings with 200k on hold. Not sure why you’d put listings on hold, unless of course your technology infrastructure is not up to scratch. We won’t talk about the delays in the launch Full review of the newly birthed website coming soon to this blog.

• Thinkproperty is rumored to be going to free-to-list. I prefer the freemium label, but whichever label you want use, it looks like the days of subscription models is well and truly numbered.

That’s the big news here in the UK online property market.

So Trulia has announced that it is NOT laying off staff while the rest of the online property industry has already acted on the downturn. Redfin is laying off 20% of it’s staff while Zillow is also acting accordingly. However, in a bold move, UK-based Globrix is claiming it is moving to the US shortish.

What can we learn from all this activity?

1. As posted previously, most start-ups are tightening belts (unlike Trulia) in preparation for being “lean and mean” to survive. Will the established portal market in the UK do similar? Most likely the media companies will continue to pour cash into FindAProperty, Fish4 & Primelocation in hopes that “leads are king” even in a downturn. Rightmove and Propertyfinder will probably raise prices
2. Search engine models (like Globrix, DotHomes and Zoomf) can move quickly into other markets when and if they choose. The 4 main portals in the UK do not have that capability (technology) without exhausting lots of time and resource to gather listings the old way (phone and say please).
3. Online agency models in the UK, like Wow Property and Brightsale should be watching the Redfin situation closely to see if learnings are there to be had.

Does all this spell more opportunity for the shrewd agent or just more pain and free selling to come?

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.