Here at Property Ad Guru, we have plenty of advice on how to make your website the best it can possibly be. There’s a lot you can do on your own, but for UK agents still looking for an out-of-the-box solution, UltraIT could be worth checking out.

UltraIT is a European company that has just set up shop in the UK. They offer website packages for agents working in both sales and rentals, along with an SEO service. While their service isn’t free – package prices start from £1395 – UltraIT promises extras such as its “Application Match” feature, which automatically matches listings to customer requirements, make it worth the investment.

Meanwhile, Australian property data supplier PriceFinder is about to launch “Share” – a service that allows agents to give their clients access to information from PriceFinder’s database for free.

PriceFinder says the information available through Share includes property price history, estimated sales price, a map searching tool, property photos, and the potential yield of a property within the current market or any time in recent history.

At this stage, Share is only available to PriceFinder’s “pro” subscribers, who pay AUD$255 per month.

If you’re a regular visitorto propertyadguru.com, chances are you understand the importance of a well designed website in enticing potential clients. You’re probably also aware of the many options available, from customised WordPress themes to single property website tools.

Now, a new UK-based website creation service has been launched with real estate agents specifically in mind. The name says it all: propertywebsitedesigners.com.

The company hopes to provide agents with a “powerful” template website system to help them sell property locally and internationally. The package, which starts at £199 with a monthly fee of £19.99, includes the ability to update all copy on the website, a search system, country, region and city control, currency conversion, email, hosting, and statistics. Agents also have the option to feed their properties to over 30 property portals around the world.

propertywebsitedesigners.com says what makes their service special is the fact that they do not expect agents to become “web experts”, but aim to provide a professional, fully managed web presence that empowers agents to update their web content and manage their property listings easily.

Next time you’re shopping around for a website design team, don’t forget to have a read through our advice on what to look for in a good web designer, along with our Top 10 Tips for Your Agency Website.

A new website has been launched in the UK to give renters the ability to publish reviews on properties, landlords, estate agents, and the local area.

The propertyreview.com allows users to upload their reviews for free and provides a search option so they can find reviews by location.

At the moment, there are around 30 reviews available, and while there are some with a rating of 100 percent that sound slightly like listings, many seem to be genuine impressions of properties, landlords, and agents.

Those who disagree with the content of the reviews can flag them as “dodgy content”, “spam”, or “just not true”.

While the website is aimed squarely at house hunters, agents may be able to make thepropertyreview.com work to their advantage by using it to keep track of their online reputation.

For more tips on controlling your online reputation, check out our article here.

UK property portal findaproperty.com, which has just come out with an iPhone application, has also released a widget showing UK average house prices that can be added to any website.

The widget displays asking price data for both flats and houses in any UK town or county for either sales or rentals. findaproperty.com explains that it shows asking price changes for the last 90 days in both graph and tabular formats.

The widget takes a daily snapshot of the prices at which properties are advertised on the website for the last 90 days and then plots them on the graph. The widget’s graph features clickable data points, so the user can find out precisely how much the average asking price of a flat or house in that area was on a specific date. Asking price data is drawn from findaproperty.com’s database of over 600,000 properties.

Meanwhile, findaproperty.com parent company The Digital Property Group (TDPG) is touting the success of both findaproperty.com and primelocation.com over the past few weeks, claiming an increase in traffic has boosted the number of enquiries for its agents.

According to a company statement, on 18 January findaproperty.com recorded just short of 215,000 unique visitors, which is 11,400 individual visitors greater than the previous record set in August 2009. The next day, primelocation.com attracted just over 168,000 unique visitors, which is its recorded highest number.

TDPG says that in both cases this boost in visitors translated into enquiries for its agents, with lead totals for primelocation.com and findaproperty.com between 1 and 19 January increasing by 21 percent and 59 percent respectively compared with the same period in 2009.

The company also states that for the first 19 days in January its websites delivered a lead to an agent every 2.2 seconds, compared with a lead landing every 3.1 seconds in 2009.

TDPG sales director John Notley said these were “outstanding” numbers, even taking seasonality into account.

With TDPG’s parent company recently bringing globrix.com into the fold, 2010 looks set to be an interesting year as this portal network, along with zoopla.co.uk’s, tries to close in on that other UK property portal, rightmove.co.uk.

We first reported on UK-based single property website creation tool estatecreate.com when it launched in February last year. At the time, it was pitched as a challenge to agents in that it offered an alternative selling tool for home owners.

After launching, estatecreate.com decided to include an agent-focused option in its subscription offerings, allowing agents to create single property websites to promote their clients’ properties.

Since then, it seems agents have been clamouring for an option that doesn’t involve them creating these single property websites on their own. So estatecreate.com is now offering to do the website creation work in a 48 hour timeframe, and give it a property-specific domain name, for a fee of £99.

“estatecreate.com websites work out at around £30 each if an agent subscribes to our service, so we think £99 is a very reasonable price for having one built for you,” says Henry Yates, estatecreate.com founder and CEO.

estatecreate.com picked up two awards in 2009: Outstanding Achievement in Web Development at the Web Marketing Association’s 2009 WebAwards, and the Innovation Award from UK news website The Negotiator.

Not only is this a great way to promote your listings to an international audience, it is also a great tool to differentiate yourself from your competitors when marketing to potential sellers.

If you would like to be a guinea pig and help us test the application for free, just go to www.listglobally.com and click the link on the home page to register for a free trial. Once we receive your request, we will be in touch via email with your login details.

home.co.uk isn’t convinced these agencies have the best online marketing strategy. The search engine had this to say about the importance of advertising on multiple portals:

“Does it mater how many property portals an agent advertises on? Yes indeed it does. Further analysis by home.co.uk shows that the agents that advertise most widely have by far the lowest typical time on market figures. Hence, just being on rightmove.co.uk isn’t enough to have the best property sales turnover.”

The survey also revealed that nearly seven percent of UK agencies don’t advertise online at all.

home.co.uk maintains that the best sales turnover rates are seen by agencies that advertise on seven or more of the major UK property portals. According to the survey, agencies that follow this strategy see properties on the books for 56 fewer days than agencies that advertise on less than seven portals.

“As we’ve being saying time and time again, agents really need to consider reach when planning their online advertising campaigns. More portals equals greater reach and a much faster sales turnover,” said Doug Shephard, business development director at home.co.uk. “Moreover, prospective vendors can easily find how widely an agent advertises online and this encourages more instructions.”

According to home.co.uk, the top five portals in terms of sales are rightmove.co.uk, zoopla.co.uk, primelocation.com, findaproperty.com and fish4.co.uk.

The news just over a week ago that Google was “entering” the UK/European market has sent the share prices of Rightmove and Seloger into a tailspin. Seloger dropped by 9% while Rightmove has plummeted a whopping 17%. Seloger has since recovered to its pre-news price while Rightmove continues to be significantly down.

So let’s look at what happened, will the property portal landscape change and is this impact on the share prices is justified.

An article by the Financial Times (Dec 2 titled “Google set to enter UK property market”) seems to have set the cat amongst the pigeons. The article stated that Google is in talks with British estate agents and that “experts” say that an entry by them to the market could pose a serious threat to existing property websites. The article didn’t talk about what Google was going to do and Google didn’t comment. So there is really not much to go on. So the only guide we really have as to what Google may do in the UK and Europe is what they have done in Australia.

Google “entered” the Australian market 6 months ago (July 2009) when they made it possible for agents, brokers, franchise groups, and portal sites to place their listings on Google Maps. When a user does a search on Google Maps (not the main Google search) for real estate, Google plots the houses in its database on the maps and users can then click on the various dots to see if they like the houses and then are driven back to the advertiser’s site.

At that time, there was a similar uproar and many were predicting the death of realestate.com.au and domain.com.au and the REA Group share price dropped nearly 7% from $5.90 to $5.50. However in the 6 months since the announcement by Google, the REA Group share price has increased 60% to $8.84, the traffic to the site has increased from 4.5m UB’s in June 09 to 5.4m UB’s in October and analysts are predicting an additional 20% revenue growth for the REA Group in FY 2010.

In August, PropertyPortalWatch wrote about the challenges for Google knocking over the market leaders. Here is the link to the article called “The Challenges for Google Real Estate”. All of these still hold true.

Many hope that Google will be the saviour from the “big bad” commercial property portals and deliver free marketing to the agents. However this is a simplistic view and underestimates the challenges Google faces. The challenges include gaining enough listings, maintaining their quality, driving traffic to the maps area, and ensuring the interface is attractive to consumers.

Even if Google is successful in addressing the above, they will only be delivering clicks to the agent’s site not email leads. The agents will need to invest more in higher quality sites to convert the clicks to leads. This, of course, comes at a cost. The old adage holds true, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

It will be interesting times and if I was an agent, I would be putting my listings on Google. However, any clicks I get from Google should be supplemental to my existing online marketing strategy and not replacing my use of established portal sites.

A former propertyindex.com employee, who asked to remain anonymous, contacted us late last night to say that a large number of people at the portal have recently been made redundant and that it has now gone into administration.

“I would suggest that any agent who has credited their propertyindex.com account gives serious consideration to getting their money back and/or closing their account before they are unable to do so,” the former employee said.

propertyindex.com was first established in September 2007 and launched in the UK in late 2008. The portal seemed to be off to a promising start, hiring a number of new staff and creating many new partnerships within its first few months of UK operation.

In an interview with telegraph.co.uk earlier this year, founder Darren Richards (pictured above) explained that he was investing part of the £30 million gained from the sale of his dating website, Dating Direct, in propertyindex.com.

In November last year, Lee Bramzell told propertyportalwatch.com what he saw to be the main challenges facing the portal:

“The key challenge we have is to effectively communicate the fact that there really is no reason not to give propertyindex.com a try. We are using our investment to reduce every barrier to trial and we believe there is no financial risk involved as agents only pay when they receive a lead.”

By May 2009, propertyindex.com was reporting a 22 percent increase in the number of unique visitors from the previous month to 315,000. In July, the portal said it had seen an increase of 15 percent in the number of property enquiries it had received since April.

The only hint of trouble at the portal came back in April, when news of propertyindex.com’s listings on eBay first came to light and it seemed agents had no knowledge of the arrangement.

propertyindex.com has been contacted for comment.

[Image:telegraph.co.uk]

A new scorecard system will rank agents’ performance across four key metrics: new listings, available stock, time on market and average click-through rate. rightmove.co.uk says this will allow agents to measure branch performance and track their relative position:

Agents will also be able to define their target markets using a mapping tool:

“The new Rightmoveplus homepage is the ideal tool to keep rightmove.co.uk members instantly aware of what’s happening in their local strongholds, and whether competitors are encroaching on their patch,” said Miles Shipside, commercial director of rightmove.co.uk.

The Negotiator points out that rightmove.co.uk’s terms and conditions prohibit agents from making the names of competitors public for marketing purposes, and that the portal is asking agents to report any suspected breaches.

Rightmove plc’s recent interim management statement put the number of real estate agent members at 14,100 at the end of October, up 8 percent from the low point seen at the end of January 2009.

The new Rightmoveplus features are scheduled to go live for all rightmove.co.uk members today.