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.

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? 

YouTube has long been the grand-daddy of online video websites, but now there is a new player who looks to improve on the YouTube system. The service is called Vimeo and it’s worth having a peak. The salient bits of the system include -

• 500 meg of free space with a free account
• better sharing capabilities
• more widgets for your website and tools to expand your presence on other sites (facebook etc)
• privacy channels so you can share with only those you wish to
• high definition video support (important for those pricey pads!)

So if you’re thinking it is time to start using those digital cameras (with video) to better show-off your property portfolio, Vimeo might be the place to help you get started.

Inman’s Connect conference is coming to NYC from Jan 7-9. Probably the equivalent of ‘internet world’ with a focus on the property space, a great way to network and learn about how the web is changing the global property business.

Also, another item for the calendar, is the upcoming Agent Expo in Islington, Oct 14 & 15. A more local event but not as fun as a trip to NYC.