A new property portal is launching in the UK on Thursday (October 3). It says it will not be charging agents now or in future, and regards the charging model as outdated and broken.
Called Propertini, it is a launch from an international portal business based in California – and says it aims to shake up the UK residential market.
It says it will not charge agents because its mission is to help users, and that means getting as much inventory as possible. It says if it were to charge agents, then not all would use the site, and the user would not find the home they were looking for – and that would not be a sustainable business model.
Chief operating officer Rhys Davies said the site will make its money from advertising. He said it would be the type of advertising that added value to a property search without disturbing it – for example, a supermarket could purchase the right to say that it is 200 yards from a property, entitling it to free delivery.
Davies went on: “The unique capability to search for properties worldwide from one website is something of real value to the property-buying public.
“Coverage and accuracy are key issues for us and the forthcoming addition of new international territories will only make our proposition stronger. We think this can be a game changer for our industry. We have set a new benchmark.”
The company, which says its portals now cover 20 countries, has been quietly testing the UK proposition prior to launch and said that volunteer users were impressed.
Davies said: “Despite the proliferation of expensive, well-promoted portals internationally, we believe that the internet still has not delivered a good enough service for finding property.
“Factors such as limited coverage, simplistic search functionality, poor quality control and lack of after-search services can leave the property vendor, buyer and agent short-changed.
“To provide the most complete inventory possible, we will not charge real estate professionals for adding their listings. We value this data and believe that paying us to reproduce it is a broken, outdated model.
“We use cutting edge technologies such as geo-location and artificial intelligence to make our property search as accurate as possible and the entire system has been designed to make it a frictionless process between searching for property and arranging viewings with the agents.”
The site has now gone live in the UK, at propertini.com
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Comments
@Gordon
I agree. I admire Scott for his passion, but his verbose comments and continuous bleating does put me off. Same goes for the likes of Property Network and Radar etc. I am sorry to say but I can't take these portals seriously. they look and work awful. And the fact they come out protesting and slagging off other sites on here convinces me that they don't have it in them to make it.
I'm with embarrass agent on this - he's got it spot on - every agent moans about Right Move and Zoopla, yet they are all too quick to slag off any potential new portal before it gets going.
I do find it cringeworthy that Scott Creasy is trying to promote his portal, when his efforts would be best placed elsewhere than here.
As an agent for the last 21 years, I'm still willing to try and break the monopoly of RM and Z, of the all the new portals, the only one I see properly advertising is needaproperty - keep hearing the radio ads.
seeing the comments that various people have left on this thread listed one under another in Scott Creasey's reply is quite embarrassing.
As an agent I have also been guilty of slagging off not only RM and Zoopla but new portals who try to make a go of it
We all want alternatives it seems but most of us who post here don't seem to want to give any of those possible alternatives a chance.
@ Rayhan Rafiq Omar - That's very interesting and an excellent strategy on behalf of Zoopla.
@Aceofspades - Yes you are right, and I apologise. Just haven't been on the EAT for a few months I simply haven't had time and assumed you may have forgotten who we are.
@Why - I think there is a very fine line between finding fault and reporting our findings in an attempt to confirm what others in the thread had already surmised is happening. Maybe I crossed that fine line I'm not sure.
But as Aceofspades pointed out "The 'opinion' of a competitor is to be taken lightly"
However that said as a competitor who actually took the time to look not only at the front end of their site but at as much of the backend coding as we could gain access to, in order to assess how much competition we can expect from them, I think I was probably able to offer a slightly more informed view of how their site works at present and what they have to offer you as agents.
In my opinion, my comments,offered more of an insight than those who read this press release and simply dismissed the idea with these sort of comments.
"Another one ?"
"This website is a joke"
"i thought americans were supposed to be more clued up than us brits"
"Yeah free until they run out of money "
"THIS IS NOT NEWS."
"Must be a Y in the day, another portal.........yawn"
"don't you just love blind certainty!"
And so on and so forth.
@Why - Perhaps focus your efforts on building a better portal and you may win over some followers .
Have never stopped since day one, still on it and listening to those who are supporting us, and winning over more than just some followers every single day.
Many sites, including new portal entrants, use Zoopla's freely available API to display Zoopla listings as their own: http://developer.zoopla.com/
Why do they do it? It drives more traffic back to Zoopla, for free.
@ScottCreasey
Scott, I think your strategy of shamelessly promoting your portal and finding faults in existing or new portals is what is really letting you down. Perhaps focus your efforts on building a better portal and you may win over some followers .
Scott, pay for an 'article' if you have anything useful to say. There is very little respect for the commercial hijackers on EAT.
Propertini are certainly worth monitoring. The 'opinion' of a competitor is to be taken lightly..the EAT public are more than clever enough to arrive at their own opinion anyway.
Or is Zoopla paying propertini for the hoped for leads that may be generated?
@sleuth - I am reliably informed that their feed comes from Zoopla
So that would mean that zoopla are being paid (because they don't offer anything for free) to feed to a company that could, it if works, be in direct competition with them.
So either your informant was wrong, or Zoopla have a master plan to assist this free company until they are a real threat to Rightmove.
Then they will buy them out and start charging all the agents who moved over to them because they were free in the first place, thereby giving Zoopla an even bigger slice of the market in the hope they can bring RM down and become a monopoly rather than be part of the duopoly..
Or is that just too complicated and far fetched?
I am reliably informed that their feed comes from Zoopla
@apalling - award winning? who actually gave you an award?
@ appalling
Fair enough: thanks for your response.
I will happily defer to your knowledge on websites.
This is not a new model, we Finders and Sellers have been up and running for 12 months in the UK and internationally.
We now have nearly half a million properties listed in 49 countries by 5000 agents. I haven't posted on the EAT in a few months because we have been too busy promoting our site in Europe via our Spanish office.
We have already seen propertini and have checked out their site, it looks like they have been operating for about three years which is interesting because according to Google they are way below us in the SEO stats.
According to our programmers they do seem to be scraping properties from other sources (which we don't) at present. A give away is when you see this at he bottom of a listing
Marketed by Foxons, via primelocation via nestoria,
Although they do offer a number of xml feed options, we only recognise Dezres and XML2U. If you wish to set up an xml feed with them you will be paying £12 per month, not a vast amount I know but definitely not free.
Interestingly enough we are also partnered with XML2U who over the last six weeks have introduced 102 international clients and their portfolios to our site, free of charge. We don't charge any of our agents to feed to us.
"it aims to shake up the UK residential market."
Well we'll see. You have to offer something new for that and this isn't new in the UK.
http://www.findersandsellers.com/
@Ajax
FYI am an Agent MD with 20 branches and an award winning website developed in-house - trust me I know a crap website when I see one - just like you probably know crap copy when you see it.
Looks like there won't be many running costs, and if they have financial backing from the US I can't see why it won't be able to cope on an advertising income model. No call centre of salesmen, no salesmen on the road, you just sign yourself up for free. Granted the site needs some work doing. I can't search for a one bedroom flat in my area for example. The property pages are pretty crap as well. Worth keeping an eye on though.
This website is a joke. The ads are taken from all other sites. The user interface is just horrible. A passed out grad will design much better than this..
@ appalling
Well, I have looked at it again and it is fast and efficient.
I guess you must want to knock it because you are from RM or Zoopla ... or perhaps Property Live?
As I said yesterday, I am a journalist with no axe to grind.
tried it - what a load of rubbish - slow to load, poor info badly presented and lifted from other portals abysmal functionality. A first year IT grad would do better than this!
even If your properties are getting uploaded free being on here will do you no favours
HATE Rightmove, all of us together could wipeout RM in a few days if we delisted, god that would be awesome! Even 50% of agents delisting would bring it down, they are on a tightrope.
Wait, there will be another tomorrow.
My post got scrambled, I was saying ahouse.uk.net is already here and well worth a look.
These guys are late to the party
>
is already running and well worth a look.
@Peter Jones
I assume your post is a joke?
You would join any portal that charges reasonable fees? Is this irrespective of advertising, market share, leads, quality etc?
You left RM 2 days ago?
So you haven't seen a downturn in leads yet, lets wait 28 days if you do nothing proactive to replace them
"I despised Rightmove but felt coerced to be a member as many of our sales were via Rightmove leads"
Okkkaaayyy?!?! You left a portal that provided you with many of your sales leads because they charged more? This is I assume to go to several portals charging 50% less that will provide you with less leads and therefore less sales.
There are only 2 portals the customer cares about
don't you just love blind certainty!
Their mission is to "help users" - so not the agent. Doesn't sound great does it? At least RM purport to help agents. Listing tools from the US are usually dreadful. Money on that it will sink without trace.
It's a pity some are yawning before they see the site.
I have seen it and am impressed.
But then, I am a journalist and keep an open mind on these things.
The ostriches may want to shake the sand out of their eyes when they see it.
Sounds similar to the portal that I've been developing for the last year or so and that's catching on throughout the South East: http://www.ahouse.uk.net
@Peter Jones
I had a similar experience. I agreed to let an estate agent "sell" my house, in fact, I felt coerced to use one as there was no viable alternative.
They just take your money and what grates me as much is that we never got a visit in over two years from our so-called representative and the service provided by them was poor.
When someone did eventually buy my house I was charged £10k.
My daughter sold her house through another agent and she was only charged £2k and hers sold straight away.
I really do hope that some new portal will come along and succeed in letting us cut out the middle man.
Must be a Y in the day, another portal.........yawn
@Peter Jones
Well said! RM will be taken down and its going to be one street party!
You must have not been paying them enough, when I was operating mypropertyforsale.co.uk and uploading to RM some months I was having to pay £13,000 yes it typed correctly THIRTEEN THOUSAND POUNDS!!!!!
I got a visit every 3 months, without fail when i was a member.
THIS IS NOT NEWS.
Good luck to the portal. We look forward to the day when Rightmove will be seriously challenged by any other portal. We will join any portal that charges reasonable membership fees. We left Rightmove two days ago after six years of being a member. I despised Rightmove but felt coerced to be a member as many of our sales were via Rightmove leads. Rightmove, in my opinion, abuse their number one position and from other agents I speak to they are despised by most estate agents. They just take your money and what grates me as much is that we never got a visit in over two years from our so-called representative and the service provided by Rightmove is poor. I really do hope that one of the new portals that is to be launched will succeed. If they do Rightmove will lose members in droves!
Yeah free until they run out of money and then write to you to say they need to charge now !!!!!!!!1
I agree we all mock these new portals and most of us HATE Rightmove, all of us together could wipeout RM in a few days if we delisted, god that would be awesome! Even 50% of agents delisting would bring it down, they are on a tightrope.
Hmmmmmm, let's wait and see before we jump to any conclusions eh?
The promotional blurb above doesn't inspire yet, but we all want competition in the UK portal market, so let us see what they have to offer, give them a chance.
'artificial intelligence to make our property search as accurate as possible'
Are aliens controlling this site? Gonna be out of the world!
i thought americans were supposed to be more clued up than us brits on business. I haven't read anything so naive in my life.
Another one ?