Many property searches quite rightly start with a visit to a web portal such as Primelocation, Rightmove, Findaproperty or Globrix. However its important to understand where their limitations lie particularly when you use the facility to “Contact Estate Agents with your requirements”.

To show you what I mean lets try Primelocation. Go to www.primelocation.com and let’s do a search for a 2 bed flat in NI (Islington) for a 2 bed flat in the price range from £750,000 to £850,000. Don’t enter any keywords. I have just done this and it returned me nine properties from six estate agents.

;A useful facility you might think is the ability a web portal has to contact all the estate agents that may be relavent to your search both now and in the future. However when you go to fill in your specific requirements in the Contact Estate Agents box at the bottom of the page only agents with properties that feature in your results are contacted. The Site excludes the vast majority who may have property available in the coming days and weeks. Not very clever!

I wonder what their fee paying estate agency members would say if a single one of them twigged this? There are at least twenty that I would be in daily contact with if I had a client looking in the area (which I currently do) and thats without even bothering the agents in NW1 and NW7 who cover some of the area too! So what should you do?

The answer is simple. Go back to the price box and drop the minimum price to £20,000 and the upper price to £15M plus. The contact box miraculously fills with another 64 potentially relevant estate agents and with a click of your fingers you can wing a detailed and well written e-mail (more on how to write one in a future blog) to seventy estate agents with your enquiry.

A great way to start a search seriously.

Labels: Property Search, Property web portals

Google have yesterday declared their intention to launch an online property web site portal. This will give Estate Agents and sellers an equal opportunity to market their properties free of charge on the web site of the most powerful advertising business in the world. Google are on track to earn about £1.6 billion in the UK this year. No wonder RightMove the largest existing property portals shares dropped so much on the news. However its not the impact on portals that matters its the service that we get from estate agents.

There are a number of sites that home buyers use as the first ‘portal’ of call in property finding. The main ones are Rightmove, Globrix (Surprised?), Find a Property and of course Primelocation. All of them feature a fairly clunky mapping mechanism which Google’s cutting edge mapping and street level photography feature will excel at. If this is coupled with internal photos and a description in a seamless presentation for online remote viewing then I really cant wait!

We have already seen good local estate agency brands become swallowed up by large financial services behemoths. Companies like Prudential and Royal & Sun Alliance caused many estate agencies to lose brand identity and staff to lose enthusiasm and purpose. The appearance of Google’s portal will continue the tendancy for Estate Agents to look more amorphous and very much a second tier resource. Which portals survive and which don’t does not matter. Its Estate Agencies that are more important. The reality is that we are not at the stage where Google will be showing buyers houses, taking offers or progressing sales. Estate agents and home finders should welcome this and give sellers more value by concentrating on being more available to show properties on days like Saturdays when most of us buyers want to view and most negotiators seem to stay at home!

Labels: estate agency competition, Property web portals