A rival claims OnTheMarket secured only 6,000 hits on Wednesday - the day of which one agent using the new portal tweeted that it would still use Zoopla, Rightmove and others.
Data revealed by Zoopla claims that on its first day, Monday, the OTM website attracted only 23,000 visits. Zoopla says many of these came from industry participants interested in seeing the website for the first time.
Since then traffic to OTM has halved daily to 12,000 visits on Tuesday and less than 6,000 visits on Wednesday. This compares to an average of 1.5 million visits per day to both Rightmove and Zoopla's websites.
The hit numbers have been gathered by independent internet monitoring service Hitwise, says Zoopla.
Meanwhile mystery surrounds a message posted on Twitter by London and Home Counties estate agency Statons, pledging that despite being signed up to the OnTheMarket portal it would still be advertising its properties on Rightmove, Zoopla and other portals as it saw fit.
Statons, which has six offices across north London and Hertfordshire as well as what it calls a vast network of international buyers through our associates in Moscow, Monaco, China, Mayfair and the USA, posted the tweet at 1.15pm on January 28.
It read: We are members of OnTheMarket but WE ARE NOT dropping Zoopla, Rightmove, Prime Location or any of our other Property websites.
The tweet was sent to the agency's 440-plus followers - and seen by Estate Agent Today and other media outlets - but deleted shortly afterwards. There are no OnTheMarket or other portal logos on the agency's website.
EAT has contacted Statons but the agency has not yet commented on the tweet.
Yesterday we reported that Zoopla was claiming that some agents advertising on OTM were finding what it called creative ways around the infamous one other portal restriction.
Zoopla claimed unnamed agents were choosing to either ignore the rule and remain on Zoopla, Rightmove, PrimeLocation and OTM and in some cases have been open about it.
Others were allegedly choosing to list one branch with ZPG and another with Rightmove and share listings so they get the benefit of all listings being on all portals; or create a new brand operating from the same office and use one brand to list on OTM and the other brand to list on the other portals, again getting all listings on all portals; or electing to share listings with competitors where one company chooses Rightmove and another chooses Zoopla and all listings being advertised across all portals.
Comments
@Ziggy If you are a loyal user of a portal and you hear that another company is trying to shaft them, would you go and give business to this company
Taking stock from one company and putting it in your shop window is hardly innovation.
Have you considered what would happen if all other portals went out of business leaving a mutual as the entire market
The CEO of this mutual would have unfettered power over the industry and would force all agents to comply and at some point increase fees and subservience. Power for power's sake.
From the fall of communist governments, we know that central control doesn't work. Most people believe a free, competitive and fair market place is best.
@Guest (Joanne)
I am sorry but you are not addressing my point and I am at a loss as to know what aspect of the matter you are talking about. However, we must disagree and let it rest.
"And as someone said facebook, twitter and other social media is now crucial in getting your clients properties seen."
Erm... actually, no it isn't.
You've been sadly misled.
To Ray: of course I know all the traditional ways I am 46 and seen the demise of classified newspaper ads. One portal plus one other wont cut it today. It's not 1993 anymore though
Why sign up to OTM if you are not going to follow the 'one other portal rule' That was the whole point!
I have never signed on to the whole OTM movement. Unlike most agents out there, and this is largely because we (not just us but most agents) secure high single transcation fees in London for both Sales & Lettings, actually think both portals represent a good ROI.
The entire premise and sole reason for creating and launching OTM was to 'de-stabilise the monopoly held by RM & ZPG'. Why then are agents refusing to abide by this rule and finding 'clever ways' around it The whole reason you guys signed up is only valid and worthwhile if you follow this one simple rule.
Otherwise, you are acheiving no goal at all and, on top of that, have just increased your property marketing, many tied to a 3 year contract, that is far from cheap (as a start up portal) and will never (in my opinion) compete with the market leaders.
If you want to change things stand by your guns- but please dont whinge and whine and then when you have the chance to (at least try) to make a difference fold. And not just fold after giving it 3/6/12 months but fold after 5 days! How very, very sad!
The company's marketing brochure, downloadable from their website, states "All Statons properties are promoted on the leading property search engines, including Primelocation, Rightmove. Country Life, Find a Property and Zoopla giving our clients national and international coverage."
While there is clearly a lot of uncertainty surrounding this particular situation, I'm sure that the example above of Agents' marketing blurb is not the only one that doesn't paint a true portrait...
Well i've looked everywhere on OnTheMarket.com and can't see this company advertised anywhere. If you flout the rules then it's quite right that you should be booted off.
@Guest (Joanne)
May I respectfully suggest that it is you that does not understand marketing.
Marketing is many things, including methods. The agents job is to actually SELL the product using their own methods. In recent times the word marketing has been used incorrectly to mean selling - probably because it sounds more 'posh'
I think many of 'old' estate agents don't realise they need now to understand marketing, your job is to market your clients properties.
And as someone said facebook, twitter and other social media is now crucial in getting your clients properties seen.
To David, ok David you know where to go for a car, but did you know that AA put millions is advertising their portal Motors.co.uk.
How do I know I am an ex KAM for autotrader.
It takes a LOT of convincing people to move away from not just habit but success.
Thank you OTM. Just interviewed 10 for a managers job. 4 felt OTM was going to go against current agencies they worked at and they were looking to move to a duo portal agency and use that against OTM agent member valuations. Thank you OTM
Come on. Thats a good click each day from OTM agents and a few lost visitors looking for a dating website
Zoopla's going down. How can a company with a price earnings ratio of 36 (appropriate for a HUGELY exciting tech stock with MASSIVE potential) do anything else
Just a few days following the launch of OTM, big geographical areas have been decimated for Zoopla. Take a look at Scotland, Devon, Cornwall for example .... all the large agents have abandoned them and all the nicest properties have vanished from their pages.
Loyal users of Zoopla are going to quickly start asking where all the
properties have gone .... and given the UK obsession with property, word will spread like wildfire .
OTM not so strong in London yet, other than in the wealthy areas where the large agents are dominant. But lots of people in London search for property outside London for holiday homes etc, so they'll quickly get exposure to OTM.
OTM at the moment is very new and will require a time to pick up pace and catch up with the rivals of rightmove and zoopla. I have to admit I am very impressed with the cleanness of the website and how simple and easy it is to use. I do believe it is early days to count it out of the fight against RM and Z, give it a little time to see where things go. Advertising can create a large amount of traffic.
Joanne does raise a good point that people will instinctively go to autotrader (RM) as it is the well known brand of searching. However if a advertising campaign showed me a new portal to search that was easier to use then I would also begin to use that portal.
OTM at the moment is working in the best interest of the estate agents and therefore will need an intensive to move the general public to use a new property portal. However advertising can have a massive impact. Case and point "Cillit bang", a new cleaning product that I cant say I don't know of anyone who has not bought and tried it. People will always be drawn to something new and shiny. Hopefully, when the advertising launches there will be a surge to use a new shiny product.
tl;dr: Give OTM time to get started, remember rome was not built in a day.
To be honest, the property portal model will be under greater threat by Facebook & Twitter, plus possibly Yahoo and a cheaper Google hyperlocal offering that is coming in a few weeks, where post-code targeted ads are cheaper with proper data and metrics to prove effectiveness than the site and email fees the main players charge. It's a brave new world, nearly all property companies are way behind in how quick value is better achieved away from the old ways of doing things, even online.
The analogy that people wont know what portal to go to because they havent needed to buy or sell a house in that time actually affirms my beliefe that over 50% of agents are thick and ignorant. I havent bought a car in 5 years but I know the best place is autotrader!!! 15m bugdet will be spent in 3 months.
The agents up north are dropping Zoopla, so what it was never that strong anyway so all you are doing is giving all the beef to Rightmove which was the portal OTM wanted to poke a stick in the eye of. I dont think any thought has gone in to this whatsoever.
People dont understand portals and traffic. And IP addresses and how they are counted either.
Graham Norwood.................The bias you show against OTM by highlighting negativity towards them is almost unbelievable. You seem to have no other property matters to report. Having said that OTM will not have a chance of success unless the agents themselves become much more proactive and BLAST their membership in all of their advertising and have massive visability in their offices. At the moment there does not seem to be a great deal of evidence of this and if it doesn't happen quickly - within two/three weeks at the most OTM will fail.
The Hitwise figures will be Visits, a Visit is a series of one or more page requests by a visitor without 30 consecutive minutes of inactivity (hits is the wrong terminology totally) so it is entirely possible the website has so little use so far.
I'd be very interested to see what the advertising media plan looks like, if as mentioned above it's TV and Press then they'll fail. If it's TV, mobile, Facebeook paid ads, Twitter ads, programmatic buys and a heavy use of video, with of course paid search as they won't appear in most rankings for months then they'd have a decent traffic rise and create some awareness with those 100s of 1000s of people looking each month and using the Internet as the start and finishing point. TV is branding, Digital is delivery, call to action and data capture.
It will take not weeks, nor months, but years to be a major player and if they are not utilising the very best property advertising people then they'll very possibly fail sooner rather than later.
As far as Steve Jobs goes and Apple, they didn't think about themselves, they thought about the person who would use what they produce and made the experience so good they made an almost unbreakable brand loyalty, plus they purposefully drip fed better product updates to keep their fans eager and those fans became their marketing mouth pieces. It was years before they started advertising and have yet to have a Facebook page unlike nearly every other major brand.
There are so many people here who don't know how the Internet works, the digital figures and the marketing complexities I'm drawn back here to help clarify. I've done this for 25+ years, and digital for 16.
I applaud any new entrant into a market, but without proper good advice, so many wash up.
Alex, wishing something doesn't make it so, well it sometimes does but not in this case. My agenda is to try and inject some common sense and logic into the debate. Your analysis is just plain wrong, wrong about apple, completey wrong about how people use the Internet and whT makes them change. To switch to OTM it would either have to have exclusivity on most of the stock, or have compelling features not available elsewhere. The idea that agents promoting it will cause users to use it is ridiculous and naieve, all that will do is make the agent look stupid. By the way, Apple had superior everything, hardware, software, everything, what stopped their progress was Steve Jobs belief that these two things alone would give him the market. He was actually outflanked by Gates and IBM although in the long run his vision was correct
sorry, my post was duplicated for some reason!
@ Jacqui -
Which Jacqui, if you checked your facts, will be shown to be due to the fact that Zoopla changed their software to make it more difficult for agents to remove themselves - check it out, I did when I saw a great number of my local competitors still on Zoopla on Tuesday....Most if not all are now off (I am looking now).
OTM and its rules are a farce! You only have to chack your area on both Zoopla and Rightmove to see most agents are advertising on all portals.
@Aidenteptoe
Are you from Zoopla
Simon, please. You have an agenda, what it is I don't know, frankly, I don't care.
The fact of the matter is that the VAST majority of Jo Bloggs public will not speak to an estate agent over a 5-10 year period, (unless a letting agent where movers are more frequent). They won't know about Rightmove V's Zoopla, Primelocation V's OTM - they will start to do their homework when they need to, when they decide to move.
All this vitriol from you will go unnoticed. It will be history but the time the vast majority of vendors and purchasers start to look at the market.
OTM is new. It has a great take up from Agents, agents who will be telling these vendors and purchasers all about it when they first speak to them.
A timely reminder for you - take Apple, there was no way it could compete with the likes of IBM or Microsoft (hardware and Software) when it started and was considered a niche market for graphic designers only. Today The most 1/4 profit made by any public company in the world in history.
From little acorns Simon, and with the backing of the number of agents OTM has, agents themselves have a vested interest in making it work and will do so. The alternative Bend over and hand the existing portals the pot of Vaseline.....
ONTHEMARKET WILL FAIL
Oscar and Felix what rubbish
The better portal will wipe them out. They have no hope of being here this time next year
Zoopla is right, agents need to find creative ways to keep their properties on the best portals
The main portals have millions of views per day On the market has almost none.
I know the guys at OTM personally and they are hopeless, couldn't manage a children's party
These views may seem extreme but I've had enough of this, we will see our agents return to Zoopla and other property portals when these North London agents fail
When you come back to the main portals your price will be higher boys and you will pay for your arrogance
Now OTM has launched, I can look back and with hindsight admit I severely underestimated the number of estate agents who would join. However, this is not really a failing on my part, it just means I overestimated the common sense of some of the top firms, or at least that of their decision makers. So, for the sake of consistency I will quickly outline what is likely to happen next. Let's imagine you build a boat with a big hole which means it will eventually sink no matter how hard you bail out, the more people who get on the boat the faster it will go down. I have news, people don't like estate agents, they are suspicious of them, intimidated by then, scared of them, so the 'quality' OTM wants to project will be lost on everyone but estate agents. In further news, consumers use portals for research so they can avoid talking to estate agents for as long as possible. A portal which aims to give a 'clean uncluttered experience' is actually going to irritate consumers who already have much better places to do their groundwork. The only group of people likely to use OTM in large numbers are their members and apparently not for long. Branch staff already hate OTM, when the miserably misconceived TV ads and Country Life ads produce nothing (almost no-one looks at either any more) there is going to be a full scale revolt. If OTM succeeds IT will be for reasons I frankly do not comprehend.
This is clearly a pre planned strategy from Zoopla where all this week and next week there will be announcements that will try to get agents to stick with them and ignore the one other portal rule. Wouldn't be surprised if they gave Statons a few quid to try it on.
I'd take those figures from Zoopla of 6000 with a pinch of salt, there is no way there was only that many hits.
Agree with ALL of the previous posts. OTM is four days old. The 15m it has in start up capital will begin to be spent from this weekend on print and TV advertising. The public will soon know all about it.
OTM would have been mad to launch all the advertising and drive the public to the brand new portal without ensuring it was running smoothly first and ironing out any possible glitches. It has now done that, properties are listing correctly and plenty are now on there. Branches local to me are all branded and creating questions. OTM will soon increase in hits. No worries here at all
I can hear Graham Norwood hitting the keyboard and foaming at the mouth every timeless writes one of these, ermmmm, "news" (!) articles. Methinks he doth protest too much.
I'm not an OTM agent but even I can see that something not right with these figures.
There are 4600 branches with possibly an average of 4/5 people if not more that's 18k to 24k people alone who would be checking to make sure listings are corrects etc. I checked the site on 4 occasions myself to check what other agents where on and what it looked like. I even doubt there was only 23k hits on Monday.
OTM starts advertising this weekend. Until now, the general public won't have heard of them. Watch the hits rocket. Up to now the industry will have been logging on to the website and I include myself in those numbers.
EAT is now officially a farce and completely in the pockets of Zoopla.
OnTheMarket has been running for 3 days for god sake.