Brightsale

Important new research on home buyers’ changing browsing habits was revealed today by national online estate BrightSale.com.

BrightSale’s research was conducted over the month of November 2008 and measured the percentage of its sales leads generated by:  a) established property portals such as PropertyFinder and Fish4 etc and b) directly from organic searches over the internet.

The analysis flagged up a startling trend: a full 28.8% of BrightSale’s sales leads came from direct searches over the internet.  This is people typing a specific street or building into a search engine like Google and being taken directly to a relevant property on BrightSale.  The sales leads which came direct from the internet were especially concentrated in areas such as new builds and apartment blocks.  But leads were generated on a wide spectrum of different property.

November 1st to 30th 2008

BrightSale Managing Director Andy Etches tried to explain what was going on:

“Buyers searching for an apartment in a particular city centre block are not well served by property portals.  They end up having to trawl through literally hundreds of listings that are not actually in that building.  Increasingly, we are finding that these buyers are just typing the name of the building or road they are interested in into Google or Yahoo and using the results list as a more focused and relevant search.  This is a very worrying trend for the portals and for many traditional estate agencies.  But it is certainly one that we expect to continue accelerating as more and more people use internet search engines as their first port of call for all internet searches.“

The results suggest that many traditional agents may be misguided in placing so much confidence in the property portals alone to deliver buyer leads.  Mr Etches said:

“In this current dire sales environment, agents simply cannot afford to leave almost 30% of potential buyer leads on the table.  At BrightSale we are obsessed with search engine optimisation and ensuring that our client’s properties are given absolutely maximum exposure on the internet.  Unfortunately for a lot of vendors, not many high street agents have the expertise or ability to do this effectively.”

BrightSale success in attracting organic search leads had already led the company to review its portal policy.  Like many other agents recently, BrightSale has withdrawn all its stock from RightMove, although for the time being its listings continue to be shown on all the other major portals.

BrightSale intends to continue to monitor the trend towards organic searches replacing portal leads and to present further data, covering a larger time span, early in 2009.

ENDS.  

Wow, what a few weeks it’s been here at BrightSale Towers!  Releasing groundbreaking new features, adding a huge amount of new property for sale,  tying up partnership deals and above all else to our loyal readers… moving the blog!

After many weeks of deliberation, we finally decided to switch platforms and integrate the blog closer with the site.  We hope this will make it easier for people to find and encourage comments and interaction with our customers and fellow property bloggers.  You might also notice we’ve moved our press section to this part of the site too, so those wanting to stay up to date with the latest BrightSale company news can now subscribe by RSS to receive the latest news as it happens.

We hope you like the new blog appearance and we look forward to hearing from you all soon!

We hope you have noticed our newly designed home page – and we hope you like it! Here at Brightsale, customer experience and aesthetics are important to us, and we are quite pleased with our bright and clean new design – especially as it contrasts so sharply with the dire and dour mood of most of the estate agency profession!

Given that we are now on version 3.0 of BrightSale online estate agents, we thought this would be an ideal time to take a trip down memory lane and look at BrightSale’s evolution over the past 2 and a half years.

BrightSale 1.0 (December 2005) - The seminal first album
When we first created BrightSale, we really wanted to make sure we stood out against the typical, subdued and sometimes intimidating high street estate agent websites and the often unprofessional “sell it yourself” property websites. We needed a genuine brand impact and an experience that would set us apart from everyone else in the market. This lead to the very bright and friendly BrightSale 1.0.

The first version of BrightSale will always have a place in our hearts, it ensured we launched with a bang and made sure everybody knew who we are. BrightSale 1.0 can even claim some property industry premiers, most notably:

• Live Google Maps with satellite images of every property
• Interactive, direct and open messaging between vendors and buyers
• A completely new property listing “author tool”.

We look back on the original BrightSale and smile, it was friendly, open, honest and truly reflected our ethical reasons for entering this marketplace in the first place. BrightSale 1.0 still remains as the benchmark for all online property sales websites, a notion which is reinforced when we look at our competitors websites! As they say, imitation is the greatest form of flattery!

BrightSale 2.0 (January 2007) - The difficult 2nd record
Thanks to a full years worth of experience in the online property market, we had gained a true understanding of what people wanted from an online estate agent. We listened to a huge amount of feedback from customers and a decision was made to tone down the somewhat brash and colourful appearance of the early BrightSale to give a more traditional and “business like” look to the site.

With BrightSale 2.0, once again, we were in front of the pack introducing more property “world firsts” such as:

• The ability to publicise a property through Facebook
• Perfect search engine optimisation of every property
• Live driving directions to a chosen property
• A viewings calendar that gave you real time feedback on all viewings for any given property
• A huge amount of administration features for our trained agents

We believe that BrightSale 2.0 cemented us as the most innovative and fastest growing online estate agent in the UK.

BrightSale 3.0 (August 2008) - The definitive third album
The latest version of BrightSale is something of a statement to us. It is the perfect blend of both of our previous site versions, clean, bright and friendly, yet professional and feature rich.

As is expected from with BrightSale, the changes are not just superficial. BrightSale 3.0 introduces a whole range of features that allow us to move onto another level in terms of customer service. Our experienced agents now have instant access to every detail they might possibly need to ensure a quick and smooth property transaction for every one of our customers. We have even created our own “artificial intelligence” system which will gives our agents the ability to pull up all suitable “live” buyers to any given property. It’s even bright enough to work out which buyers are best suited and in the best position to purchase any given property and alert our agents without any interaction! Internally, we’ve nicknamed it HAL 9000, it’s that clever!

Of course, we have been listening to our customers and over the next couple of weeks we will be introducing several unique features which combat the major issues that people have with estate agents, such as lack of communication and poor feedback. We don’t want to give too much away at this stage - but suffice to say that as far as we are aware nobody else in the industry (be they traditional or online) offers the level of information and control over a residential property sale that the new BrightSale tools will do.

Rest assured, here at BrightSale we are continually thinking of ways to make property transactions smoother and more open. We believe we are the true pioneers of modern estate agency and we aim to stay ahead of the pack for many years to come! Watch this space!