Does the world really need enormo?
View Larger Map
A big motivator for us is the knowledge that the perfect portal doesn’t yet exist - if we can’t offer something fresh and effective, we might as well give it all up and move to the country…
So yesterday, the biz dev team ran our regular check to see how what’s out there measures up with what we’re hearing from agents:
“I want international buyers.”
- Uk agents now want to target international buyers - so the big national portals have added ‘overseas properties’ sections to their sites. While this strategy means their sales teams can reach out to a wider range of agents (and still-healthy markets), we think non-UK sections are generally underwhelming in design and usability, and feel like add-ons.
- In Portugal, the big portal is CasaSapo, with around 80% market share. It indexes about 600,000 listings and is widely known by agents. Yet strangely, in a country whose selling point is “good weather at low prices” and whose real estate is beloved of the Brits, the Germans and the Russians, CasaSapo exists only in Portuguese and in English…
> Although many portals recognize that international is important, they often don’t specifically tailor their offering for the demands of the international market.
“I want simple pricing.”
The pricing structures from the main portals are making it pretty hard for agents to properly gauge value. The model of charging per number of listings is common in Germany; Propertyindex in the UK runs a cost-per-lead model, as does Immonet, which asks agents for a massive €7.95 per lead – whereas Polish portals such as Oferty and DomiPorta are now dropping prices to reflect agents’ shrinking marketing budgets.
> Overall, there seems to be little link between price and traffic, or price and geographical reach - pricing reflects market coverage and has a lot to do with portals’ brand awareness. Which could mean an agent pays hundreds of euros a month to list their property on a well-known site, but in a ‘haystack’ of thousands of others…
“I don’t want to be tied down…”
- Just like pretty much every service industry, portals must be demanding less and less committment from their clients…right? We can see things are changing, but the big players still demand lengthy lock-ins. German giants Immonet and Immowelt have twelve-month contracts (with a three month notice period for the latter). Is this good enough for agents in an economic climate changing so quickly, and where new alternative marketing channels spring up every day?
> For a portal to work properly in today’s fluctuating economy it’s got to offer the agent flexibility, and not be either too much or too heavy for the agent. The national champions right now are a scary mix of expense and commitment.
Our conclusion? The perfect portal doesn’t (yet) exist. In short, there’s definitely space for something different and innovative in every market that we picked – something useful for small and large agencies, with flexible pricing and contracts which make sense.
Which means our lives do still have meaning. 
