sylleptic - mark hopwood’s blog

News International is (according to this article) about to launch a vertical search engine focussed on the UK property market. To some, this might seem like a fairly uninteresting development in online property advertising. There are lots of property websites in the UK, Rightmove being the most prominent. Zoomf (who I’m involved with as a non-exec director), Propertyfinder and a host of other companies are also in this very competitive niche, so you might ask who needs another property website?

The interesting fact about the News International launch is that it’s going to be a property search engine, as opposed to a property listing site. Traditional websites which list property for sale or rent do it on a listing basis, where people pay to advertise (Rightmove), or pay to view (Loot). You therefore only see a partial view of what’s on offer at each of those sites. The anecdotal evidence is that people using traditional sites have to visit 6 websites to get a fair view of everything that’s on offer, each with its own interface foibles, and keeping an eye on the property market in your area is therefore very hard to do ongoing.

Property search engines, on the other hand, crawl the Internet like Google does, sucking in details of all the properties they can find, pulling them into a standard structure of prices, addresses, number of bedrooms and such like, so you can see a huge range in one place. They make their money in a variety of ways, but mostly by selling increased prominence in their listings to specific estate agents, or to other companies like mortgage lenders who want to sell to people interested in property.

For users the advantages are clear: you visit one site instead of six, you get one user interface onto all that property, and it’s really easy to check every day what’s going on. Zoomf even has a mobile site where you can check on your saved searches on the bus home. Given the likelihood of users switching to this more convenient model, estate agents and other advertisers will increasingly switch their advertising spend away from traditional listing-based sites to next generation vertical search sites.

So the News International development is a very interesting one, which is likely to accelerate the disruption of property selling considerably.