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Year gets off to a record start for portals
April 2006 The beginning of 2006 has seen more use of the internet by consumers looking for property than at any other time over the past five years.
Even the records set in September 2005 have been surpassed as consumers continue to use the 'net' as their first port of call when looking for property. The data is collected from the five major property portals as shown in the table (right).
Property numbers on the sites have flattened out with only a small increase in overall numbers, mainly due to an increase in international properties and rental properties available on the sites.
Homes for sale have actually decreased by some 7.5 per cent just over 100,000 to some 1.25 million in total on the five sites.
The largest property numbers are found on Rightmove, with some 680,000, followed by Fish4homes with 450,000. The other three major sites have from 180,000 to 280,000 total properties.
These figures are however from an increased number of offices uploading 31,000 in January and it is interesting to see that the number of properties per office is decreasing from 61 total properties per office in September 2005 to 57 in January 2006.
The trend was even more pronounced in properties for sale as those numbers dropped from 51 to 40 per office over the same period.
It is 10 per cent down on the January 2005 figure, confirming the trend that instructions are becoming more difficult to achieve.
The site traffic figures however show a different picture over a similar period.
There have been major increases in all the major trend indicators full particulars viewed, e-mail inquiries to agents, page impressions, unique visitors and user sessions.
All have increased in the last year and even against the September 2005 figures there have been major increases.
User sessions have risen to a massive 22.5 million per month with Rightmove providing very nearly 60 per cent of the total with some 13 million user sessions a month. Findaproperty have the next largest user sessions with some 3.8 million.
Page impressions have risen to a massive 500 million in a month. Five years ago the equivalent portals produced some 50 million page impressions in a month so traffic has risen 10-fold in the intervening period.
As the effectiveness of the portals grows so does the cost. This is the first comparative table I have done where Fish4 has started to charge and of course they have done so in an innovative way with the payment based on results £1 per e-mail and 30p per click through to the agents site.
It is of course early days in their charging regime and the figures may not yet show those who do not want to be charged in this way but early indications are that agents are prepared to accept the principle.
Back in 2002, charging was in its early days. The highest figures were for inner London agents Rightmove was at £100 per month, now £300, Primelocation was £250 per month, now £480 and Property Finder at £180 per month, now £175.
Find a property were committed to their per property charging system at 50p per property but now they are moving all new agents on to a per office per month basis in a price range of £90 to £275 per office per month.
The portals of course argue that the massive traffic that they generate makes the payments by the agents good value for money and they consider the return from portal presence to be much greater than from the average spend in newspapers. Only agents can really tell at the end of the day and to do so you have to measure the response from all forms of marketing.
I have yet to see a really effective method of measuring response to local newspaper ads but so many agents still swear by them as the prime source of property instructions.
Certainly there is a growing number of agents maybe particularly in London and the South East who have withdrawn from local newspaper advertising with beneficial impact on their business.
Some, however, feel that there is an opportunity to provide a service at a lower cost. Look4aproperty are making some progress but whether they will generate sufficient support from either the public or agents is something that only time will tell.
Their aggressive anti-Rightmove stance is something that may well backfire now that so many agents have subscribed to the Rightmove flotation!
Others will undoubtedly come forward and certainly there has to be value in creating a site that can attract support from agents and generate traffic from the public.
Source: Bob North is a business consultant and a member of estate agency specialists GCG Consulting. He specialises in applied technology, including website functionality and the introduction of IT systems and applications.