Zoomf Blog - UK Property Blog.

In the US, one of the biggest property portals, Realtor.com, has just announced that it will allow sell-by-owner listings to appear within it’s website. Realtor.com is the national agent website for the US market and you could say is the equivalent version of the NAEA here in the UK.

Is this a natural result of the judgment made by the Department of Justice against Realtor.com? Or is it another way in which to drive more revenue from the 5 million people who visit Realtor.com month? Probably both, but it doesn’t matter how the PR machine spins it.

The point is that the US government got involved in allowing access to an 800-pound gorilla in the property space so that FSBO (for sale by owner) could be listed next to agent listings.

Will this happen in the UK? Remember what happened last year when Tesco tried the same thing with Rightmove.

Lots of subscription model portals would be lynched by the estate agents who are paying to list if SBO appeared in the same results as theirs.

But what happens when property search engines start to include every listing regardless of source? A search engine is meant to include all related content, so if you use that definition, why would SBO listings be un-included. Aren’t we as a search engine meant to include everyone who wants to list?

And what about the fact the SBO is such a small part of the market in the UK and most agents are not really threatened by SBO. (that is what a lot of our closest agents tell us)

Would like to hear your voices on this topic

We had to wait an extra week to finally see the NAEA website go live, but was it worth it? Well there’s good news and there’s bad news. Rather than review the entire service, we’ll be having a look at the website product itself, focusing on the user experience and functionality. By the end of the first quarter of 2009 we’ll be able to review the ‘commercial success’ of the site to date.

PROS

• Search box. The user is immediately focused to begin searching. No distractions other than the “bird-like” woman standing under the search box.
• Results page has a list and map view.
• Registration for users.
• Fairly simple website with only 3-4 core pages; homepage, listing page, details page and other.

CONS

• No street search. Most of the search engines allow street search. Why not? It is a more targeted lead than a postal code or area search.
• Big picture of ‘friendly agents.’ Why is this massive picture taking up so much homepage space?
• Overseas Property is coming soon. If you cannot search for it, don’t put it on your website.
• 13,000 agents but only 50,000 properties. This doesn’t make sense. 50k worth of property to search is 1/6 the number of listings of most property portals. Not good.
• Guides are coming soon. Same as above, web design 101 - don’t disappoint users with a teaser to unavailable content.
• Homepage pop-up. Why isn’t the cookie recognizing that I’ve seen the pop-up window already. Every visit to the homepage shows me the ‘please come back’ pop-up. Begging for users to return doesn’t work
• Map is does not drag and populate with properties.
• Cannot click-thru to agent website. You get to see the link but you are not able click and go. This is a BIG problem for most estate agents who invest in their own websites. Not to mention the SEO ramifications for both parties.
• Cannot search by keywords like gardens, mews, georgians etc. A basic filter that most sites can provide.

Overall, the current product is not that exciting and in many ways disappointing. There isn’t a lot of innovation that we can find (if any). Of course the bigger issue is that we have no idea how many users are actually finding this website. We’ll see if over the next 6 months if the NAEA is able to compete for online eyeballs in a crowded space.

As I always say….

You can have the prettiest website in the world, but it’s completely pointless if no one uses it. Look at GumTree and Craigslist, ugly websites, massive consumer impact.

Just a quick update for our readers…

8:25am on Wednesday the 15th. Was able to see the NAEA PropertyLive homepage, but upon the first query, it gave a web-server error. So inability to search is probably going to turn some people off

At least we’ve got a peak of the homepage design.

Once they’ve got a working website, we’ll provide some reviews of the newly birthed portal.

As of 8pm Monday night, the propertylive.co.uk website, the long awaited project from the NAEA is having a couple issues with it’s webservers as captured below. We know how difficult it can be to launch a brand new website. Let’s hope they get this resolved soon.