Property Portal Watch

Q2 Profits Up at loopnet.com

Alice Allan — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 22:44:58 +0000

US commercial property portal loopnet.com has reported a boost in revenue in its financial results for the second quarter of 2010.

According to the portal, Q2 revenue was US$19.4 million, up from $18.8 million in the first quarter of 2010 and $19.2 million in the second quarter of 2009.

Net income applicable to common stockholders was $3.2 million or $0.07 per diluted share, compared to $1.8 million or $0.04 per diluted share in the second quarter of 2009. Non-GAAP net income down slightly to $4.2 million or $0.10 per diluted share, compared to $4.6 million or $0.11 per diluted share in the second quarter of 2009.

Along with financial gains, loopnet.com is also reporting a 19 percent year-on-year increase in registered members to a total of 4,287,730. The number of premium members subscribing to the portal is also up 0.8 percent from the first quarter of the year to 69,368, however this is a 2.8 percent decline from the total in the second quarter of 2009.

loopnet.com’s premium members are now being offered access to its property records database, which the portal recently said had grown by 50 percent since its release in May. The average monthly price of premium membership is now $66.65, which a 1.2 percent increase compared to the second quarter of 2009.

In terms of listings, loopnet.com now has 7 percent more commercial properties on offer than it did a year ago with a total of 766,356. Profile views of these listings have jumped 47 percent year-on-year to 51.5 million for the quarter.

loopnet.com adds that its average monthly unique visitors as reported by comScore was approximately 1.5 million. This is an improvement over the portal’s first quarter average of 977,000.

99acres.com Claims Market Lead

Alice Allan — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 02:23:08 +0000

First quarter profits are up at Info Edge, parent company of Indian property portal 99acres.com, to a total of 173 million INR – 30 percent higher than in the first quarter of 2009.

The company is also reporting total Q1 income of 724 million INR, which is up 17 percent compared last year’s corresponding quarter.

In an interview with moneycontrol.com, Info Edge co-founder and CEO Sanjeev Bhikchandani describes growth at 99acres.com as “pretty good,” but admits that the portal has still not moved into the black.

“In 99acres.com we have actually emerged as clear leaders with traffic share moving up to 48 percent or 49 percent in last couple of months,” Bhikchandani told the website, adding that growth at the portal is higher than at naukri.com, the company’s jobs portal.

Along with its financial results, Info Edge has also announced a reshuffle in its top management positions. The board has moved current COO Hitesh Oberoi to the managing director and CEO roles, in place of Bikhchandani.

Bikhchandani will now work as executive vice chairman of the company. Ambarish Raghuvanshi, the company’s CFO and director, will cover the roles of group president of finance as well as CFO.

realtor.com App Tops Clareity List

Alice Allan — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:49:13 +0000

US-based real estate technology consultants Clareity have released a review of mobile real estate applications, finding realtor.com’s app offers the most features for users.

Clareity ranked the apps against a list of 16 criteria that covered features such as driving instructions, saved searches, sold listings, and agent search. realtor.com’s app had 11 out of these 16 features, while Coldwell Banker and redfin.com both had 10. zillow.com, SmarterAgent and BestHome4me all scored nine out of 16.

“But features aren’t everything,” states Clareity, before listing the apps in terms of user ratings on the Apple App Store as of 11 June. At the top of the list were realtor.com, apartmentguide.com, redfin.com and BestHome4Me, all of which had average user ratings of 3.5.

Clareity also provided its own test results, outlining the pros and cons of each application. realtor.com’s app could only be faulted in that listings cannot be sorted by date, while zillow.com’s app was said to offer data that “seemed to be out of date.”

“This is a highly competitive space and it wouldn’t take much for others to overtake the leaders,” Clareity’s report concludes.

rightmove.co.uk Adds Draw-a-Search

Alice Allan — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:03:30 +0000

Leading UK portal rightmove.co.uk is now offering users a new “draw-a-search” option that shows properties within a specific area.

Using the new tool, home hunters can select a specific area on a map and view corresponding listings even if that area does not match a particular post code. These results can also be refined by the usual search criteria and filtered further by characteristic.

Once a search area has been created, users can save it and subscribe to property alerts. rightmove.co.uk told estateagenttoday.co.uk that over 10,000 search shapes were saved in the first few days of the tool’s release.

“It’s great news for rightmove.co.uk member agents that we have introduced another ground-breaking feature to impress their potential sellers and landlords,” says Miles Shipside, the portal’s commercial director.

rightmove.co.uk has been offering the same map-based search feature to member agents since November 2009 through Rightmoveplus.

zoopla.co.uk Adds Head of New Homes

Alice Allan — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 22:38:51 +0000

UK portal zoopla.co.uk has just announced the appointment of Chris Browne to the role of head of new homes. The portal has also added new listing sort options and a “listing history” information box to property pages.

Browne’s most recent role was sales director for smartnewhomes.com. His experience also includes over twenty years in the the estate agency and new home developer sectors.

At zoopla.co.uk, Browne will be responsible for overseeing the growth of the portal’s new homes channel and managing the new homes sales team. His responsibilities will include developing and managing major client relationships as well as implementing new products and features.

“We have one of the largest and fastest growing audiences in the UK and offer a compelling and innovative proposition for our advertisers to reach a unique audience,” Browne comments.

“Online marketing is not only an essential tool for developers but is by far the most efficient source of leads and enquiries and zoopla.co.uk is focussed on being the most efficient marketing partner for our developer clients.”

Meanwhile, zoopla.co.uk has announced a few new features for users. The first is the option to sort listing results to find the most reduced properties, showing the date of the reduction and the percentage of the listing price.

A “most popular” sort option has also been added, showing the properties that are attracting the most attention.

Along with these options, zoopla.co.uk has added a listing history information box to property pages. These show the first listing date and price for a property, along with subsequent price changes and page view tallies.

Earlier this month, zoopla.co.uk released its iPhone app, which offers instant value estimates for 27 million homes via an Augmented Reality display.

iproperty.com.sg Goes Commercial

Alice Allan — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 00:58:19 +0000

Singaporean portal iproperty.com.sg has now added commercial listings – a move it says brings “the first dedicated commercial property website” to the market.

The portal’s commercial section has gone live with over 3,000 listings from companies including Knight Frank, CB Richard Ellis, Sime Darby Bhd, and Mapletree.

Shaun Di Gregorio, CEO of the iProperty Group, says we can expect enhancements to the new commercial offering in the near future.

“Soon, the listings will be shared across both our Malaysia and Singapore portals, giving our customers a regional platform to market and promote their listings and their brand,” Di Gregorio explains.

iproperty.com.sg recently reported a 102 percent increase in unique visitors between December 2009 and June 2010.

Disclosure: CAV Investment Holdings, a related party of Classified Ad Ventures – the owner of propertyportalwatch.com – owns shares in iProperty Group parent company IPGA.

Nestoria Goes Live in France

Alice Allan — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 23:24:06 +0000

Property search engine Nestoria has now added France to the list of countries it covers with the launch of nestoria.fr.

This takes Nestoria’s coverage to a total of six countries: five in Europe and the company’s Australian offering, which went live earlier this year.

Nestoria co-founder Ed Freyfogle explains that nestoria.fr has launched with portal partners including annoncesjaunes.fr, immonot.com, avendrealouer.fr, and the regional brands of AtHome, which is owned by REA Group. More partners are expected to join over the coming months.

“As ever, we are big believers in release early and release often,” says Freyfogle. “The site is far from perfect. Users should expect to see us get better over time as we learn. We welcome all feedback.”

Freyfogle adds that Nestoria is planning to cover more countries outside Europe later this year. Detailed information on the launch of nestoria.fr can be found on the search engine’s French language blog.

homes.com Links with forrent.com

Alice Allan — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 02:23:31 +0000

US property portals are quickly realising that rental listings are becoming a priority for home hunters. trulia.com came out with its rent vs buy index in early June, and homes.com quickly followed with a more prominent rentals section.

Now, homes.com has gone one step further, linking with forrent.com to give users access to more rental listings.

Both these websites are owned by Dominion Enterprises, which runs a network of 40 websites and publishes 280 magazines. According to Hitwise, forrent.com is the 13th most popular US real estate website at the moment, while homes.com stands at number eight.

A press release from the websites explains that Hitwise has seen significant growth in the search term “homes for rent” versus “houses for sale” between July 2009 and early July 2010, and that a June 2010 study conducted by the National Apartment Association found 76 percent of consumers now believe renting to be a better option than home ownership — a 5 percent increase from 2008.

“Because consumers researching homes to rent are changing the way they search, we felt it was necessary to expand our online presence,” said Terry Slattery, president of For Rent Media Solutions.

“A Harris Interactive study noted, 25 percent of people who plan to move in the next three years say they will search for both homes for rent and homes for sale. By partnering with homes.com, one of the top ten real estate sites according to Hitwise, a leading global online competitive information services company, we are maximizing visibility for our multi-family housing customers and offering more variety for people searching for homes, people who might not have been exposed to these listings before.”

The deal with homes.com follows forrent.com’s move to power the apartment section of chicago.com in early June.

Regional Promotion for domain.com.au

Alice Allan — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 00:58:15 +0000

domain.com.au owner Fairfax Media has struck a deal with APN News & Media that links Fairfax’s online classifieds with APN’s regional newspapers.

As bandt.com.au reports, the deal means that Fairfax will be able to promote domain.com.au as well as drive.com.au and mycareer.com.au to regional advertisers.

“This will allow APN to offer to a vast number of local and regional advertisers access to Fairfax’s world class digital platforms and thereby extending their reach nationally for the first time,” Fairfax chief executive Brian McCarthy told smh.com.au.

smh.com.au adds that the deal does not cover the Coffs Coast region, where both companies publish competing newspapers.

This deal follows a move by Fairfax to promote domain.com.au across its news websites in May. Since then, domain.com.au has become available on the iPad and started offering agent advertisers a personalised mobile website option.

Interview with Gill Markham – rentright.co.uk

Alice Allan — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 22:38:03 +0000

Over the past 20 years, Gill Markham has worked for brands including rightmove.co.uk, Hambro Countrywide, and The Digital Property Group. Markham is now head of operations for the newly relaunched rentright.co.uk, and says the website “has the potential to rival any competition in the market place.”

What exactly is rentright.co.uk?

rentright.co.uk is a newly relaunched lettings-only portal, which has been redesigned for both the industry and end user alike. Established in 2004 as a letting agents directory, the last 12 months of development work have taken us to an exciting new level where we now have a product to match, if not rival, any competition in the market place.

What makes you stand out from other property websites?

In the past, the majority of portals concentrated their efforts in the residential sales sector, through both the sales and marketing strategies of their products. Lettings is a huge part of a lot of peoples lives now, and for too long has been treated as second best by many.

We aim to offer a service rather than just a profile and property listings. Our superb customer support and technical team contact our agents on a regular basis to make sure that we are doing everything possible to help agents advertise. Agents have their own profile listed on a random rotational basis that allows a level playing field for all agents and an equal chance at winning landlord instructions and maximising the agent’s brand awareness. The profile pages display industry accreditations allowing agents to raise their profile and show credibility in the market.

rentright.co.uk’s agent login has statistics that gives the agent transparency of leads and comprehensive telephone call reporting with SMS alerts so they will never miss an enquiry, even from withheld numbers. The property detail pages include hyperlinks to all other properties in the agent’s advertised stock. This means a higher click-through rate, keeping tenants within agents’ stock and leading to the possibility of more enquires.

Can you explain how the Residential Rental Price Index (RRPI) function works and its importance?

The RRPI works on a town and county basis, and is updated in real time to provide the average rents by property type/number of bedrooms, based on marketed prices of properties displayed on rentright.co.uk. Agents who are members will also be able to break this data down further by postcode to locality/street level.

The advantage of having such a comprehensive data set is that it will, over time, become the UK’s number one knowledge base of the rental sector for agents, landlords and end users alike. There is already media and government interest in the rental data that we have.

How do you make money?

As a newly relaunched business, we have spent considerable sums of money to offer the member and consumer a website that is both easy to use and innovative in its approach to the market. Unlike other websites, we have a pricing policy that offers real value for money, with no tie-in or contract and prices from £59.00pcm per branch. We are not looking for a quick recovery of money spent by having inflated prices or members tied in on lengthy contracts.

What is rentright.co.uk’s biggest challenge?

The biggest challenge faced in the market place is to gain brand recognition, which will take time to do, but Rome wasn’t built in a day! However there has been a good response from both independent and corporate clients so far, who recognise that there is most definitely a place in the market for a portal purely dedicated to lettings.

Who are your closest competitors?

Whilst there are well established portals in the market place, they are for both residential sales and lettings and we believe we have something different to bring alongside, and be complimentary to what agents already do, until such time that we offer a real choice for change. We are unique in offering rental property listings only (we do not diversify and offer any other listings such as jobs, trades people etc) and understand our core market.