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Confusion over launch of NAEA portal

15 October 2008
Written by rosalind renshaw

The National Federation of Property Professionals has defended the softly-softly launch of its much-hyped property portal PropertyLive.co.uk as it emerged that sites with a similar name got there first.

We had been told that PropertyLive.co.uk was going to launch yesterday, on Tuesday, but disappointed agents told Estate Agent Today that they could not see this had happened.

The confusion deepened when a spokeswoman for PropertyLive said the launch had been delayed for two days to deal with some glitches but that the site was being ‘showcased’ at this week’s Agency Expo.

Peter Bolton King, chief executive of NFOPP, however, last night denied that the launch plan had in any way faltered, and said the site had indeed been launched, in beta format. He said it will go live towards the end of this week.

Meanwhile, sites with similar domain names can be easily found on the internet. Propertylive.me appears after a Google search. Melfyn Williams, former president of the NAEA and instrumental in the development of PropertyLive.co.uk, said: “As far as I am aware, this site has nothing to do with us and obviously there will be an investigation.”

According to its terms and conditions, propertylive.me appears to be owned by a company called Property Listing WorldWide.

One feature of propertylive.me is that while it is searchable and was yesterday (Tuesday) listing properties, every single one appeared to be from Knight Frank. A Knight Frank spokeswoman said she had been totally unaware of this until told by Estate Agent Today.

The firm said that its properties were, with its agreement, listed on Property Hunter, which had given the firm’s properties to Property Listing Worldwide, a sister organisation. However, yesterday Knight Frank asked for its properties to be removed from propertylive.me

Another feature is that propertylive.me does not appear to have an obvious formula for making money.

A partners page on propertylive.me features the names and logos of a number of well-known suppliers to the estate agency industry.

These include Aspasia, Vebra, Dezrez and Expert Agent. Mike Griffiths, founder of Expert Agent, said he too had been unaware of propertylive.me and that he had not been approached or paid for the branding.

Adding to the confusion, there is another website, PropertyLive.com, which appears to be a well-established business dealing in international property sales.

Peter Bolton King confirmed that PropertyLive.co.uk had been acquired by the NAEA some years ago, but that it had not been possible to acquire the .com domain. The .me domain is a particularly unusual one.

Comments

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    Firstly, it is obvious to anyone that the NAEA has dropped the ball here. I hope for all of your sakes that they can get their act together and make this portal happen. They will need to do significantly better than they are doing now. Somehow, I doubt they have the capability.

    Secondly, the comment above allegedly from "Jamie Harris" supporting Look4aProperty amuses me. L4aP's mercurial founder, has been bragging about TV advertising and marketing budgets since that site was launched (in a style not unlike that of Mr Harris if I am not mistaken).

    None of it has materialized. If you can be bother, pull the accounts and see for yourselves.

    As I recall, they also claimed to have received a multi-million pound offer to buy the site (£200M+) within about a month of launching and before he had even a handful of agents signed up. In the highly unlikely event that a real offer was made, they look rather foolish now. I can't see any more buyers lining up and the site looks tired and visitor numbers are in steep decline according to Alexa, the authoritative web information company.

    The technology was produced by a back street web design outfit in Camberley and the business is operated from a serviced address in London.

    We need to rid the industry of parasitic, dishonest bottom feeders including third party portal, HIP providers and packagers and anyone else that has a fanciful low service, high margin get rich quick scheme.

    The NAEA needs to get its act together and lead the industry out of the current crisis.

    • 18 October 2008 01:07 AM
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    I cannot believe what I am reading on these pages. Can someone explain to me why I should move my business from a website that everyone in the UK knows already and uses everyday, to a site where the owners have messed up the launch, the public have no idea about the product and as such it will not be used. These are testing times for us agents and as such we should all be looking to sell property the quickest way. This, I am afraid, is still online through Rightmove and I just can't see why I should risk what business I have left by taking a punt on a website that can't even launch correctly... Remember, the last site the NAEA had was not exactly the answer to all our prayers either, so I think i will wait and see thanks and I suggest you all do the same before you make a judgement based on your heart rather than your head.

    • 15 October 2008 07:37 AM
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    The NAEA really ought to be a little less defensive – a BETA release would ordinarily be understood to be a product or site that has been released to a specific audience for testing before launch to allow for snagging and any other modification deemed critical based on feedback from the testers. This appears not to be the case. You launch a live site and release a BETA version therefore launch and BETA in the same sentence might be considered a contradictory statement. If a BETA version has just been released then it would suggest that either that the Live version is a long way off or that the Live version will be released without adequate BETA testing. I appreciate that this is just semantics in context of Propertylive

    In the early days of the internet it was quite common for companies to register just the tld (top level domain) appropriate to their country of operation eg .co.uk. Cost was also a consideration. I am sure that the NAEA will understand the global nature of the internet and brand association so it seems astonishing that it would launch a portal when it does not own at least the other two relevant primary tld’s – these being .com and .net. Ideally it should have selected a name for which all of the top tld’s were available .info, .biz, .org, .co.uk, .com and .net. It should also have due regard for the lesser tld’s such as .me which if already owned elsewhere should certainly not be supporting a site dealing with the same subject. I think that the NAEA has shown itself to be a little naïve in this respect. I suspect that perhaps the Propertylive name became something of a sacred cow and even though it held a less than perfect domain holding the NAEA still felt it should carry on regardless. I am not sure whether this is a better explanation the just plain ignorance of the internet and brand protection! Still, nice to see that the NAEA is such a switched on, adaptable and commercially astute organisation!

    • 15 October 2008 06:36 AM
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    Please can someone limit the amount of words allowed at any one time as its giving me a migrane having to read such long winded responses!

    • 15 October 2008 05:53 AM
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    What a nonsense!
    It does not matter as long as two things are done.
    1. A very good logo for
    Propertylive.co.uk
    2. Membership should be conditional on members including the logo on Letterheads, Details and Advertisements - a copy supplied to NAEA each year on renewal. Propertylive.co.uk will then 'fly!

    • 15 October 2008 02:56 AM
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    Well said brightmove. So what if someone has registered the.com or .me or .anything else for that matter? Carry on pal - what is being advertising is the .co.uk site.

    • 15 October 2008 02:34 AM
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    all of these FREE portals are ABSOLUTELY USELESS unless they have £12m A YEAR (MINIMUM) to spend on high profile TV advertising - nothing less will do!

    I hear LOOK4APROPERTY.COM are next year planning to drop their monthly listing fee and go FREE.

    THE BIG BIG DIFFERENCE is that they are planning to spend £12m a year on TV Advertising - £1m a MONTH!

    I'm told they will make their money by other means - so agents will finally be able to use a high profile national TV advertised portal site that costs them NOTHING/NIL/ZERO!

    About time someone did this for us hard pressed agents!

    • 15 October 2008 02:31 AM
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    The NAEA should not waste it's members money by acquiring the family of web names .me & others. There are only two web domains worth having - .com if you want to look American or international or .co.uk if you want to tell the world that you are likely to be a respectable uk organisation. Anyone who has a uk.com domain - I'm afraid you have falled for the biggest con of the century. I wish I had registered the www.uk.com domain - a lot of money was made there!

    • 15 October 2008 01:19 AM
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    Confusion over the launch of NAEA portal is a nice version of they have screwed up.
    Could you imaging Apple, Nike or any commercial organisation around the world to make a statement as large as the NAEA have about a new product launch and on the day fail to do so?
    What would happen is that the leader of the project would get fired the following day. The CEO would come close to losing his of her job and the share price would slide.
    This isn’t confusion as I wrote on Sunday that .me and the sub – domains seem to PropertyLive have been a major oversight by Melfyn Williams and Peter Bolton. As I wrote before the marketing and technical team need to be fired now. The NAEA will have to change the name of pay from the member’s pot of money even more money to acquire the .com .me and other sub – domains. As I write this there are still many domains available for PropertyLive. Who is working on this?
    This further shows the lack of real research for the medium to long-term vision from with in the NAEA. .ME is an unusual one, well has any one with in the NAEA looked at what .ME domains may do for the Internet. Beta launch means that major player with in this space have a private invite this normally includes sites like the EAT. Any one seen or had a secret insight into the site, how many private BEAT invites were sent out?
    My conclusion still remains the same as Sunday. This industry needs to be shaken from with in by more than just the NAEA. The NAEA clearly still have some way to go to understand the real power of the Internet and how to play with it.

    • 15 October 2008 11:56 AM
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    What would happen is that the leader of the project would get fired the following day. The CEO would come close to losing his of her job and the share price would slide.
    This isn’t confusion as I wrote on Sunday that .me and the sub – domains seem to PropertyLive have been a major oversight by Melfyn Williams and Peter Bolton. As I wrote before the marketing and technical team need to be fired now. The NAEA will have to change the name of pay from the member’s pot of money even more money to acquire the .com .me and other sub – domains. As I write this there are still many domains available for PropertyLive. Who is working on this?
    This further shows the lack of real research for the medium to long-term vision from with in the NAEA. .ME is an unusual one, well has any one with in the NAEA looked at what .ME domains may do for the Internet. Beta launch means that major player with in this space have a private invite this normally includes sites like the EAT. Any one seen or had a secret insight into the site, how many private BEAT invites were sent out?
    My conclusion still remains the same as Sunday. This industry needs to be shaken from with in by more than just the NAEA. The NAEA clearly still have some way to go to understand the real power of the Internet and how to play with it.

    • 15 October 2008 11:56 AM
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    is this Mr Ripoff guy annoying you as much as he is me? Re: PropertyLive, we've created a feed without charge and we're not charging our agents to upload to it - the guys at PropertyLive say that they've had a fair bit of resistance and some big bills from others. We're all ready to start feeding data but I was surprised to find out that those that used the old chargeable NAEA site weren't being given automatic membership of the new site. I'm told that they've got to vet all applications to be on the site to make sure they are genuine NAEA members and the guy I spoke to lamented the fact that there's only one guy doing this. Out of our 1100 member branches, so far only 6 have passed this vetting process. So it could be a case of too little content, released too late. I wanted to send all of our customers' data to them and let them sort out the wheat from the chaff over the next couple of weeks. PropertyLive needs to up there now with lots of content to stand a fighting chance of giving Rightmove a bashing in Jan. I hope they succeed and we'll do all we can to help/

    • 15 October 2008 11:06 AM
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