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Babek Ismayil

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About Me

Founder and CEO of OneDome.

my expertise in the industry

Babek 's Recent Activity

Hi Graham, I completely agree with you that any noise made in the trade press stays in the trade press. Launching a portal isn't just about winning estate agents listings (even though it is harder than some might think), but more importantly it is about getting traffic to those listings, getting those users to engage with listings and generating leads. That is why Portals should be judged by: 1. The volume of leads generated. 2. Cost of those leads. 3. Revenue attributed to those leads. Everything else is a vanity metric. What advertising channel is used to promote properties is less relevant vs the result that channel produces in terms of leads/ business. Also if the brand awareness is an important factor, then let's not forget that the player with the Biggest Brand Awareness, Traffic and Number of users (much higher than all big or small portals put together) is Facebook and Facebook has now a Marketplace too. Largest part of the adult population in the UK uses Facebook and Facebook Marketplace is getting better and better as a product and it is Free! In my humble opinion, agents should use all channels available to them (including Challengers). The key is finding the right buyer and tenant at the cheapest cost possible.

From: Babek Ismayil 29 November 2020 13:41 PM

From: Babek Ismayil 29 September 2020 17:44 PM

Thanks for your thoughts James. There is no war for sure, but the current portal model is outdated. The overall offering and experience has’t changed since early 2000. Buying a home is just too painful, too manual with too many moving parts and friction points. It has to change. Not sure if the incumbents have the desire to reinvent themselves.

From: Babek Ismayil 09 September 2020 22:15 PM

I applaud the fact that ‘Pay to List’ portals are offering discounts to estate agents. This is the right thing to do in the current environment. However, what has happened in last few days is testament to the significant misalignment between portals and estate agents (their customers). It is a ‘them against us’ scenario instead of a collaborative one. I strongly believe that portals will need to review their commercial proposition in long term. The ever increasing monthly fees are unfair and unsustainable.Agents should not be charged for listings – full stop. They provide the necessary data to make portals successful in the first place. No portal could exist without property listings, so it is bizarre that agents also have to pay for the data they provide. Agents work with a ‘no sale, no fee’ model. Maybe portals should adopt the same concept?

From: Babek Ismayil 20 March 2020 15:21 PM

Dear Property Pundit, We are not farming data. We don’t sell data. We will never sell data. If you know anybody who claims that they bought data from OneDome, please kindly let me know. As this is not possible. As per my previous messages, I offered to explain how our business works and how we work with estate agents. My invitation is still valid.

From: Babek Ismayil 19 March 2020 15:22 PM

There is a Fundamental misalignment of interests between ‘Pay to List” portals and estate agents. Portals are focused on advertising KPIs v agents need more transactions as most of them offer a “No sale, no fee” service. Unfortunately, when market conditions are bad for transactions, their portal costs are unchanged.

From: Babek Ismayil 13 March 2020 09:24 AM

Dear Property Pundit, I appreciate that you might not be aware of how OneDome makes money, but I am very happy to explain it to you at your earliest convenience. We make money working with estate agents via profit share agreement which is separate to our listing agreement. Growing number of agents are paid for working with OneDome not the other way around. It a simple collaborative platform. Bear in mind, we are very incentivised for agents to sell houses, our interests are 100% aligned. We make money when agents make money. We don’t charge for listings for a very simple reason, we aim to reduce the dominance of major portals in eyes of consumer. As I am sure you are aware, portal businesses have a strong 2- sided network effect (supply drives demand, demand drives supply). To break that dependency we chose not to charge agents for listings and guarantee that for 100 years contractually. There is no hidden agenda, we have the same goal as any real estate agent.

From: Babek Ismayil 14 February 2020 09:44 AM

Why not to charge per lead generated or per successful lead? This will make agents and portals more aligned (focused on tangible things and result oriented) and remove all the needs for these debates? At the moment, there is a clear mismatch between portals’ and agents’ goals (advertising v transactional business).

From: Babek Ismayil 09 December 2019 10:16 AM

You are absolutely right. In the World where data is everything, agents should not offer their listings and pay for the privilege.

From: Babek Ismayil 30 July 2019 20:25 PM

Dear Michael, Thank you for your kind comments. Just to clarify the free text search on its own isn't the main point. We built it as free text as a solution to the requests from our user testing. When we asked consumers what they wanted out of their portal experience, their answer was "more filters". Obviously building an interface with 100 filters would be suboptimal, so we had to come up with an alternative solution. Our free text isn't just based on "keyword search". Free text search is backed up by the NLP engine that we have been training for a while now and by our Locality Reality algorithms that we have been testing with users for 2 years. LR scores every individual property based on a number of criteria consumers care about when they think about the property like the availability of good schools, groceries, parks, transport etc. Our search engine is in its infancy but will allow consumers to search by their needs rather than by location. As people search more and more it will get better and better in recognising certain patterns in consumer behaviour. We have embedded a lot of different technology solutions to test and understand consumer behaviour. The main problem we aim to solve is how to make the property buying process simpler and easier for every party involved. We believe the only way to achieve that is by building a collaborative communication platform allowing all key stakeholders in any given transaction to collaborate. None of the major portals has focused on that part of the user journey which we know, based on various research pieces and surveys, is the most stressful part of the process. We don’t claim to be able to fix all of the issues consumers have with a property transaction in one go, but we are certainly committed to making it happen and we have over 40 strong product and engineering team to support that goal. We have a long pipeline of products that we will be bringing to the market after the initial beta phase which we will make public in due course.

From: Babek Ismayil 28 February 2019 07:59 AM

Agree with most of the comments. We need to stop discussing Purplebricks or others. We need to focus on improving our own service and adapting our service to modern customer needs. Let's focus on what works best for our customers. Customers want an instant gratification in anything they do these days. They want minimum effort, less admin, more streamlined process.

From: Babek Ismayil 14 May 2018 10:24 AM

Cannot really comment on the quality of their service, I have never used them. But one of the reasons of their success is their digital platform. It is nice to be able to do things at 10pm. It is not just about low price, it is also about convenience and simplicity.

From: Babek Ismayil 01 February 2017 22:33 PM

I agree that constantly pushing the concept of the disruption as a way forward can be... well disruptive. A more friendly Collaborative approach from technology companies can be an alternative. Not all technology companies aim to disrupt. Technology companies need to think not only about creating something for the consumer, but also about empowering existing businesses and creating more opportunities, more leads etc. A collaborative company is one that works alongside established companies and, rather than trying to crush or destroy incumbent business models, helps to drive them forward through new innovations. What is important to recognise that the consumer adoption of technology is faster than ever and that consumers want better technology, simple process. So regardless whether we are focused on traditional or online approach, we need to adapt to the way consumer wants to interact with us. Adopting modern technology doesn't mean to change the business model or become an online business. Technology is the way forward, but it doesn't need to be disruptive.

From: Babek Ismayil 28 January 2017 02:44 AM

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