Your Right Move » For Sale

Sarah Beeny 19 Zoopla 10

Zanet — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 15:19:07 +0000

Now we it’s not a football score, but Sarah Beeny with Tepilo and Zoopla must be proud with the result of coming #19 and #10 out of 100 respectively.

That was the outcome of the annual Startups 100. This is the definitive countdown to the UK’s most innovative, inspiring and ground-breaking new companies.

This years Startups 100 list includes those who they think are the best, most exciting, promising, disruptive new businesses and entrepreneurs shaping the start-up market right now.Some you’ll know and some are less familiar, but they’re confident they’ll be a few more household names on the 2010 list by the time we start compiling next year’s countdown!

Start ups Zoopla and Tepilo success

Sarah Beeny’s Tepilo.com made the list at number 19, just beaten by Levi Roots Reggae Reggae Sauce web site and Alex Chesterman and Simon Kain zoopla.co.uk at number 10

# 19 Tepilo.com
Launched in August 2009, Tepilo is Channel 4 presenter Sarah’s alternative way to buy, sell or let your property, all for free. After realising most buyers were on the internet searching for property, and that only agents could upload property to key sites, it seemed logical to create a site that enabled sellers to upload property themselves, and save agency fees in the process. With just under 8,000 properties on the site at any time, Tepilo has already attracted 25,000 registered users, and has now launched a lettings arm.

# 10 Zoopla.co.uk
Zoopla.co.uk is aiming to become the UK’s most comprehensive source of residential property market information. With the aim of helping buyers, sellers, owners and estate agents gain an advantage in the property market, Alex and Simon set up Zoopla.co.uk following the success of their other venture, LOVEFiLM.com. The service offers greater transparency to customers, offering free instant value estimates on every UK home and enabling buyers to express interest in any residential property online. The acquisitions of Thinkproperty.com from the Guardian Media Group and the Propertyfinder group in the summer were key turning points for the company last year.

Zoopla TV Advert

Zanet — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 06:41:22 +0000

Today Zoopla.co.uk makes its national TV debut and launches a multi-million pound TV campaign.

Zoopla message is ….when searching the perfect home, tZoopla firmly believe information is the key to making the right property decisions. Whether it’s one that may gain a few pounds or a slightly older one with lots of character, here’s a few tips on how to make sure you improve your chances with Zoopla.co.uk.

ZOOPLA.CO.UK TV ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN

Leading property website, Zoopla.co.uk, has today launched its first national TV advertising campaign which will include a number of prime-time slots across ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and the Sky digital channels. The initial campaign will run for five weeks to the end of September and is part of an extensive multi-million pound TV, print and digital campaign to run over the coming months.

The new TV campaign will tap into the nation’s obsession with the property market and is designed to increase Zoopla.co.uk brand awareness and drive even greater performance for its member estate agents. 87% of adults will see the TV ad at least once during the initial five-week period and the TV campaign will supplement the ongoing print and digital advertising activities undertaken by Zoopla.co.uk.

Zoopla Tv Advert goes live today

Zoopla.co.uk has grown rapidly since its launch in 2008 to become a key source of enquiries and exposure for agents across the country and is now looking to further capitalise on its impressive growth by increasing its brand awareness through a new multi-channel marketing campaign.

The TV ads centre on the theme that finding the perfect property is much like finding the perfect partner and reinforce the core Zoopla.co.uk philosophy that free and easily accessible information helps buyers, renters, sellers and owners make better-informed property decisions.
Zoopla.co.uk has been working closely with leading creative and media agencies on the campaign. VCCP (O2, Comparethemarket, Microsoft, Texaco and Standard Life) were responsible for the creative development and Vizeum (Coca-Cola, BMW, Five and Panasonic) handled the media buying.

Alex Chesterman, Founder and CEO of Zoopla.co.uk said: “Over the past 2 years, the pace of our growth has been unrivalled in the property portal space. Our marketing to date has been largely focussed online and we are now ready to turn Zoopla into a household name targeting property buyers, renters, sellers and landlords so that we can continue to be the most effective marketing partner for all UK estate agents.”

How to advertise on Rightmove

Zanet — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 22:15:53 +0000

Is it possible to advertise for free on Rightmove?

Many seeking to sell their homes online, want to advertise on Rightmove, as they recognise this as one of the biggest property websites in the UK. Understandable as more than 90% of all UK estate agents list on Rightmove.

But after some investigations it appears that sadly individuals selling their homes directly cannot list their property on Rightmove without an estate agent.

Should it be free to advertise on Rightmove

This is due to Rightmove’s advertising policy. All properties advertised on their site should comply with the “Property Misdescription Act of 1991″. This Act was designed to protect the public from estate agents that stretched the truth about a property. It was devised to provide protection to the general public making it illegal to make false or misleading statements.

So are there any other ways that an Estate agent can offer access through there registration with Rightmove and supervise the statements made and thereby approve the submissions for a minimal cost.

It’s worth noting there used to be a few estate agents that did comply with the act, and for a small fee enabled you to get a listing on Rightmove.

Good news!.

Well i thought so, until i contacted The Little House Company online estate agency
In the past, they were are able to list your property on Rightmove for a small fee, until Rightmove decided to block the idea.

I decided to contact The Little House Company to find out what had changed.

Nick Marr founder of The Little House Company told us, “We offer an online estate agents service that does not include listing on Rightmove anymore. We were working with a number of agents but Rightmove sent us a legal notice asking us to stop which they felt was amounting to reselling their service. We now simply recommend or refer our clients to this panel if they want a Rightmove listing”.

Nick Continues, “We offer a full online agents service apart from Rightmove. Despite us being registered estate agency in the eyes of the law and the fact we produce compliant listings Rightmove are uncomfortable with us on their website as we promote private sales. They receive complaints from estate agents and we will never be on that website whilst we offer consumer choice with our services”.

“One of my main competitors www.mypropertyforsale.com has given up private listings so that he can have his properties on Rightmove if we did the same it would be yet another private sale business squeezed out of the industry”.

“We contributed to an OFT report last year which concluded: The OFT’s study into home buying and selling FEB 2010 found that the housing market remains dominated by traditional estate agents with weak competition between them on price. As property prices rise during housing booms, so too do estate agents’ fees. Overall satisfaction with estate agents, however, has improved in recent years, according to research conducted as part of the study. Where there are problems with transactions, consumers generally do not think the estate agent was at fault. The OFT believes that innovation in this sector, in particular through online services, could have a dramatic impact on the cost of buying and selling a home”.

So there we have the reasons why you can’t advertise directly on Rightmove, but there does seem to be some good alternatives to consider.

We will review some of these alternatives over the coming weeks.

Boycie’s house

Zanet — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 11:30:44 +0000

So how much would you pay for Boycie’s house?

For fans of top sitcom Only Fools and Horses it’s a dream purchase.
Currently the owners of 17 Druid Stoke Avenue, Stoke Bishop, Bristol, BS9 are selling the dream house through Morgan Beddoe, Clifton Estate Agents.

The house is famously used in Only Fools and Horses when Boycie is seen playing with his Satellite dish in the episode The Sky’s the Limit. Later this very dish causes flight havoc on all the airports and huge delays.

Boycie and Marlene's House going for 1400000

This Neo Georgian detached house in one of the finest roads in North West Bristol was constructed circa 1980′s and has in recent years undergone a major refurbishment including extensions, new kitchen, bathrooms, attic conversion and general upgrading of fixtures and fittings to a high specification.

It boasts 3 spacious receptions, a conservatory, 5 luxurious bedrooms and 4 bathrooms, truly a house for Boycie and Marlene.

So what would you expect to see this go for on the market?
According to there current agent they would expect around £1,400,000 for this 5 bedroom detached house

Rightmove for sale

Zanet — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 17:24:59 +0000

Normally you would look to sell your property on Rightmove and look to make a little in equity if the going was good in the UK. Rightmove as over over a Million properties for sale from the top estate agents and developers in the UK so Rightmove rightfully claims to be the biggest UK web site for selling property.

Today we look at Rightmove from a very different perspective…

What if rightmove was for sale, what would it be worth?

According to Smart viper there are many factors that determine the “worth” of a site. The cost of a site would be how much it costs to run it. The worth of a site is determined mainly by how much revenue the site is bringing in. Other factors would include how much traffic the site is bringing in on a monthly basis.

Right move co uk Record

So if Rightmove was for sale what would it go for?

Well you need to ignore Smart vipers costing as it reckons around 9 Million British pounds, though there figure was around 14 million dollars

On the basis that Rightmove founder sells 1% for 8 million, then i calculate 800 million pounds if it was sold, thats not bad considering it was founded by a bank and 2 estate agents. It now has around 90% of all properties for sale and at any time displays a stock of over 1,000,000 properties to buy or rent, worth around £270 billion.

Founded by three of the UK’s largest estate agency chains – Halifax, Countrywide & Connells – Rightmove is a property internet portal. Over half of all UK estate agents advertise their properties on the website, enabling users to see homes for sale or for letting all over the UK. The company floated with plans to specialise in producing Home Information Packs but this has since been dropped after a government u-turn on the idea.

To buy or not to buy

Zanet — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 11:43:59 +0000

To buy or not to buy – that is the question

An interesting report on Zooplas blog suggests that around 74% of Britain shows buying cheaper than renting. This comes from a chart that looked at the average asking price for a 2 bedroom flat against the average monthly rent.

The top 10 places across Britain where renting a property beats buying and vice-versa in current climate is shown below. While buying wins out over renting today, the impact of a rise in interest rates cannot be ignored. If interest rates were to increase by 1% and rents to remain the same, renting would become more cost-effective in 80% of the UK.

To buy or to rent

It was also found that it is still cheaper to buy than rent in London, despite high prices. London’s average rents on two-bed flats are currently at £2,155 per month with average asking prices at £446,345.

The top place where renting is a better option than buying currently is Huddersfield, where the average two-bed flat costs only £493 per month to rent versus £146,898 to buy. Renting is also cheaper than buying in a number of other places including Oldham, Brighton, Swansea and Edinburgh.

Estate agents keen to price property

Zanet — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 11:39:10 +0000

How easy is it to get an estate agent to provide a price estimate?

For the best part of the last year I’ve received an endless amount of leaflets politely offering a free valuation for my property. You know the type that claim that they have a Mr and Mrs X in their office waiting to buy our property, so pick up the phone and they will instantly provide us with an estimate of what the property value is and allow Mr and Mrs X to view at our convenience.

Last week i decided to find out how quickly can out local estate agents provide us with a free estimate of the value of our property, knowing that is all we wanted of course Tepilo and Zoopla offer an online guide, but its not quite the same.

How many Estate agents are keen to price property

To some degree it would give us an idea of how busy the market is and asses how keen the local agents were to take on new property.

After getting through the 10 to 15 minutes of providing all sorts of details we eventually get down to the main question, can you send someone round tomorrow?

The Outcome

We chose 5 local agents, of those 5 we managed to book 3 agents in the following day and two others could make it the following week. So it seemed quite easy to get them round and to give them credit they were able to give some helpful tips on where they felt the market would fall over the coming weeks.

If you do decide to select an estate agent then i suggest its worth using those with local knowledge and ones who have been recommended to you personally or an estate agent who you have used previously. Don’t worry to much about their fee as this is always negotiable. A great service, one that keeps you informed and gets a good number through the door is just as important as it increases the likelihood of a decent offer that could out-weigh any difference in fees.

Are Estate Agents needed

Zanet — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 11:30:20 +0000

I’ve been weighing up over the last year as to whether estate agents really are needed.

With Tepilo providing an estate agent free way of selling along with zero costs it has to be a consideration.
So i decided to invite some estate agents round to value my property at the weekend.
One estate agent from a national company and tow independent estate agents.

The purpose was to decide an answer to the questions:

Are Estate agents needed?
What value do Estate agents have?

Are Estate Agents needed?

Before hand i had used the excellent Zoopla app that we reviewed last week on Yourrightmove .co.uk but disappointingly the valuation of my property seemed exceedingly low. The reason being is the Zoopla application could only base its valuation on the fact that i bought the property 4 years ago for £250k. What it the Zoopla app doesn’t realise is this was a bargain price and the property was actually worth in the region of £265k. As you are aware, few people will offer £265k when the bulk of that figure will require a 3% stamp duty. Whereas £250k brings the stamp duty down to a sensible 1%.

In the Estate Agents Favour

The estate agents could easily see this as their valuation is based on what they see with there own eyes, in the same way a buyer will make an offer and purchase a property based on what they see. So Zoopla estimated a value of around £250k whereas all three estate agents estimated between £280k to £289k a hefty 50k difference. Even paying 3 or 4 k for an estate agent gives me good reason to justify that.

So as much as I’m not a massive fan of estate agents, and as keen as i am for something like Tepilo or another on-line estate agent to succeed, I suddenly realised there is a real value in another set of eyes viewing my property based on what is seen. Additionally they could take into account my rewiring , my double glazing of 4 bay windows, my reinforcing of the roof and the new decking area, new guttering and new fireplace with a log burner, additions that Zoopla could never know.

At the moment the question stands : Are Estate Agents needed? – Yes

Zoopla Vs Rightmove App Final Round

Zanet — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 08:21:08 +0000

ZOOPLA V RIGHTMOVE PROPERTY APPS FINAL ROUND

The apps are just pocket store fronts to the main web site and company
If the app works great but all communication via the web site or estate agents fail then the app has served little purpose

So which web site and company have the greater stability? Which one claims the highest visitor traffic in the UK and thereby is most likely to have proportionately more buyers viewing?

the final round for the battle of the apps

Already the apps get their own ratings on itunes – current scores:

Zoopla
version 1.0
18 ratings 4.5 stars

Rightmove
version 1.1
17388 ratings 3.5 stars

We felt that this isn’t a true reflection as the numbers for Zoopla are minimal at this point.

So we decided the main site would serve as another good barometer.

According to Alexa
Zoopla.co.uk On line since 21-Feb-1997
Alexa traffic rank for Zoopla.co.uk: 197 in the UK

Rightmove.co.uk On line since 07-Sep-1999
Alexa traffic rank for Rightmove.co.uk: 29 in the UK

Verdict: Rightmove is likely to have more UK buyers using the app as it still has a large monopoly over the others in web traffic.

Final Result: Draw
3.5 Zoopla
3.5 Rightmove

FINAL CONCLUSION

The Rightmove app would of easily lost if it didn’t address the bugs in version 1.0. Since 1.1 the app is stable and still offers the most properties for sale and rent.
Zoopla however is a much easier app with some beautiful extras tucked away in the background.

Both apps in our test provided a faultless experience.

Tepilo are about to launch their version as another challenger to these apps

Meanwhile my suggestion is you use both apps when searching for a property as they both have strengths that make them worthy to use on your iphone

Please feel free to comment below if you disagree or agree with our verdict.

Zoopla Vs Rightmove App Round 6

Zanet — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 08:16:38 +0000

ZOOPLA V RIGHTMOVE PROPERTY APPS ROUND 6

What sets it apart from the other apps?

At this point we normally ask about cost. But it appears that all these big property apps are free and rightly so. So we have changed this round to enable us to look at any features that set it apart from the competition

What extra features can Zoopla boast over Rightmove?

The map is integrated with Google and provides 3 views Map, hybrid and list
Search from within the map view
The app has a database of 27m homes
Local market data including average home values by area

There is a depth to this app that Rightmove can only match on its web site

A grueling contest continues

What extra features can Rightmove boast over Zoopla?

Rightmove is still the daddy when it comes to current property for sale and rent
It has more properties and estate agents than any other app

Verdict: Zoopla won. It just has so many more features and isnt a million properties behind in database terms, so though Rightmove has the greatest amount of estate agents, Zoopla has a depth of extra features.

3.5 Zoopla
2.5 Rightmove

Please feel free to comment below if you disagree or agree with our verdict.

Tomorrow is the final round of the apps – Can Rightmove pull it back and get a draw, or will Zoopla become crowned the king of property apps?