Portal End Game Begins

7th May 2008 The news that FindaProperty and Primelocation are to merge comes hot on the heels of the tie up between HotProperty and PropertyFinder. This looks like the beginning of an end game for the first iteration of the property portal model – where estate agents paid a subscription fee to list properties . The move can surely only be welcomed by cash strapped agents who now have one less subscription to find each month. It still looks like there are too many similar portals, however, and we expect to see further consolidation before the year is out. Fish4Homes has never really recovered from the debacle of having most of its properties (without their agents’ consent) listed on the sell it yourself Tesco Property Market last year, and looks to us to be the most likely next victim. Even Primelocation does not look impregnable to us, with its big new website launch turning out to be rather a damp squib earlier this year.

Perhaps because the early portals were set up to replace newspaper advertising, agents have been surprisingly tolerant of the subscription model. But this is now starting to change. The entry into the market of the advertising-only funded Globrix has shown agents that there is another way. After its initial rather buggy beta version, it has emerged as a strong and usable portal which will surely continue to gain traction with the News Corp. marketing machine behind it. We are also intrigued by other funding models such as the payment for leads model that is being explored by companies like Zoomf. We think this has some exciting possibilities, although property portals are not quite MoneySupermarket, and it is not easy to define exactly how valuable a ‘lead’ is at the time it is forwarded.

We expect all portals to be advertising and / or lead generation funded within the next couple of years, and we expect there to be only two or three mainstream ones (led by Globrix) with a larger number of ‘niche’ operators leading the innovation charge. The future looks better than the past, and should certainly be cheaper for estate agents. This is welcome news.

ENDS

Note to Editors:

The BrightSale’s ‘full service’ model combines a low percentage fee of 0.5% with human negotiators based in offices in Surrey and Manchester. The company was established in January 2007, and has almost 300 property listings.

ENDS

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