As the debate over the new OnTheMarket portal takes on increasingly surreal qualities, the agitator' website www.onthemarketdirect.com says Agents' Mutual is unwittingly playing into the hands of online estate agencies.
Onthemarketdirect.com was set up over a month ago and claims it exists to compare online alternatives to traditional agents. It is run by the people behind ipropertycompany.com, which this week received the endorsement of the Financial Times as the real disruptor' in the property portal sector.
John Candia, chief executive of iPropertycompany, says the launch of OnTheMarket has done nothing aside from disrupting the status quo which had protected traditional estate agency.
Thanks to [OnTheMarket] over 4,000 traditional agents are now forcing homeowners to rethink the whole industry and that is extremely beneficial to us. Property sellers now have an extra decision to make because they wont get instant access to the two major portals via an OnTheMarket traditional agent he claims.
He says he is very happy with the interest in his own onthemarketdirect.com website and promises this domain name will form a big part of our UK marketing strategy.
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Comments
I'm afraid OnTheMarket has succeeded only in making it harder to look for properties. Whereas previously all properties went on all sites simultaneously now I have to look in multiple places and I just don't have the time and inclination. Add to that the search parameters being inferior to Rightmove (can't filter by date of posting which makes it necessary to trawl daily through every rejected house to findfind any new ones) and you have broken a system which was already stressful enough. Well done for making it harder to buy or sell houses. :(
I have to disagree, the website has no public awareness as yet and so has disrupted nothing. This might well be the case for several months. None of these new sites will inflict much damage on the big yow who outgun them on advertising spend and more importantly search engine optimisation that they've built up over years.
GRAHAM, GRAHAM! You've put another anti-On The Market press release in the "news" (!) section again. Oh never mind....