Little House Company comes top in online agent survey...

01 November 2010

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5 Comments

Written by rosalind renshaw

A former ‘for sale by owner’ website has become the most successful online estate agent, says a new report.

The report undertook a comparison of online agents, looking at their prices, services, year established and the quality and popularity of their websites.

The quality of each online estate agent’s website was judged using an online tool known as Website Grader (WG) which compares various factors to give an overall score out of 100. The factors include online visibility, online popularity and the structure and features of the website.

Surprisingly, iSold – theSpicerhaart venture backed by Tesco – does not feature in the top six online estate agents ranked by quality of website:

The Little House Company
My Property for Sale
Half a Percent
121move
House Revolution
House Network

iSold does, however, come second in terms of traffic. A site traffic measurement tool called Alexa was used to compare online traffic levels. This came up with the following top six:

House Network
iSold
My Property for Sale
The Little House Company
Netmovers
House Simple

The report’s author, James Cole of The Big Property List, said the online estate agency sector was characterised by new entrants or former estate agents starting up online. But the top two, in terms of website traffic and quality of their website, were both former private sales websites which had converted into estate agents.

He said the reason why both The Little House Company and My Property for Sale had scored highly was because, as private sales sites, they had not been able to use property portals like Rightmove to market their properties and so developed by strong online marketing strategies promoting their own websites.

comparison of online estate agents

Comments

- John Carroll
The Little House is a private sales website, they use 121move to list their properties on rightmove, backdoor activity !!
- 02 November 2010 14:45 PM
- Paul
No m,ention of the private sale web site property (miss) match? No one could find them perhaps?
- 02 November 2010 11:21 AM
- PeeBee
George: That's because he isn't an 'online Agent'. Or a Chartered Surveyor. Or an inhabitant of the real world. ;0)
- 01 November 2010 14:12 PM
- George Daws FNAEA
Mr Hendry is missing from the list too.
- 01 November 2010 14:07 PM
- Adam Smith
Proof if proof was ever needed is that there is no mileage in Private Sellers websites in the UK. Most vendors prefer the traditional approach of selling through High Street Agents. As for Online Estate Agents, they do little apart from picking up the crumbs. Few vendors will try this approach regardless of Rightmove membership.
- 01 November 2010 12:00 PM