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News Story

Digital claims to close gap on Rightmove

Friday 19th December 2008

SmartNewHomes has angrily refuted the suggestion that its rival FindaNewHome has taken over as market leader. Meanwhile, the Digital Property Group which publishes FindaNewHome claimed yesterday that it has narrowed the gap between it and Rightmove.

David Bexon, managing director of SmartNewHomes, said the recent statement by FindaNewHome, reported on Estate Agent Today, claiming to have been officially recognised as the ‘UK’s most visited new homes portal’ was both “misleading and inaccurate”.

He said FindaNewHome’s claim that it received 5.6% more visits than SmartNewHomes were based on just one week’s figures. According to Bexon, this was the only week in 2008 when FindaNewHome received more unique visitors than SmartNewHomes.

He said: “While I’m flattered that FindaNewHome clearly regard their recent success as a major victory, I would like to reassure our housebuilder clients that we are and remain the leading, most frequently visited website for the new homes market. We currently promote over 17,000 homes on our site and have an average of over 270,000 unique visitors each month for this year.

“Consumer traffic to SmartNewHomes.com has remained extremely strong in 2008. Whilst peaking and troughing at certain moments throughout the year, we have remained the UK’s number one new homes website, with an unparalleled level of visitors and new homes available for sale.

“Further, I am confident that we will start the new year as we began the last – offering developers the most visited new homes website, and continuing to facilitate the home buying process for the majority of the country’s new home buyers. We will be relaunching our website early in 2009 with a new look, added functionality and enhanced mapping and search tools.”

Meanwhile, the Digital Property Group, which owns FindaNewHome and is also publisher of Primelocation and FindaProperty, controversially claims to have closed the gap further on Rightmove.

It says the latest data from comScore demonstrates that in November the difference between the number of unique visitors to Rightmove and Digital’s portals was only 211,000 – its lowest level ever.

Rightmove’s monthly unique visitors figure now stands at 1.994m while Digital’s is 1.783m.

However, Digital has combined all four of its portals against the single might of Rightmove.

Despite this, Mark Milner, chief executive of Digital, said: “We have firmly established ourselves as second in the market place and are most certainly gaining ground on the market leader.

“The Digital Property Group’s growth in recent months has positioned it closely behind the industry leader Rightmove. These two businesses are now clear market leaders, dominating the property portal traffic.”

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Posted By Bruce Shaw on Friday 19th December 2008 14:53:08

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We have been advertising on both Findaproperty and Prime Location. I gave DPG notice on Prime Location at the beginning of December. Yesterday, over two weeks later DPG tell me that I cannot advertise on just Findaproperty and that I must advertise on both Findaproperty and Prime Location. I have refused and they say that they will now give me notice on Findaproperty. Maybe if they adopt this attitude, they will find agents leaving both their sites in hoardes. What do others think?

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Posted By Mike on Friday 19th December 2008 12:01:59

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Looks like more marketing spin from Mr Milner. The DPG model is just not sustainable and agents will vote with their feet once they work out the new higher DPG charging model

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Posted By James North on Friday 19th December 2008 11:56:05

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These traffic figures are really not relevant. Digital Property Group are buying traffic to hit these numbers whereas Rightmove are not. Any company can simply buy traffic to claim users. Thinkproperty used this strategy but as soon as they stopped spending their traffic went away. Rightmove do not need to buy traffic and if you look at Google trends you see that their brand is 6 times larger than their nearest competitor. Personally I think that the portals cannot continue to spend like they have as agents want to pay less - so we will see less traffic next year.

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Editorial Contact Details - Rosalind Renshaw | rosalind.renshaw@estateagenttoday.co.uk | 01252 843 566.