A new global property portal that lets agents and owners list properties for free claims to have attracted 1,600 agents just months after launch.
Residential People was launched in February by commercial agent Christopher May, and operates in the UK, UAE and South Africa.
It is also planning a launch in China.
The portal says it has attracted 1,600 agents across the UK, UAE and South Africa with 100,000 listings.
Of these, 20,000 listings are from around 500 agents based in the UK.
Agents and sellers can list for free but pay extra for marketing tools and to have a featured property.
The portal offers the usual listing features such as lead tracking generation and pictures, descriptions and microsites.
Users can transfer listings into PDFs and the portal has also launched a new facility allowing videos to be uploaded.
May said: “We are constantly striving to bring new proptech products to the market place. Our focus is to help agents win more business and help to drive more traffic to their brand.
“We believe videos are an essential part of online brand awareness, and by uploading videos to social media and an agent’s Youtube channel we believe this will give our agents a healthy edge over their competitors.
“We plan to launch further products and our aim is to make products that are extremely easy to use and produce maximum benefit to the agent.
“Agents are starting to take note of our unique, global proposition which is aimed at disrupting the market and going against the status quo of the traditional property portal model.
“The hard work has just begun but we are overjoyed with the positive response from agents so far.
“Most of the agents that have contacted us, see us as a valuable addition to their online presence, and we are honoured that they can see the value we are adding to the industry.
“We will continue to liaise and work with agents in order to bring in innovations that we believe will fundamentally change the market.”
Taking a portal to market takes a huge marketing budget.
Not sure they will attract the investment required.
Plus once the 500 agents find out they are advertising along side owners they would want their ads removed.
We get calls on a regular basis on free portals, all a waste of time as they just want stock for their launch.
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I’ve already asked about the individual listing aspect and was told leads get passed to the agents.
I lead marketing for our agency and I would rather be on 10 platforms than 2… Free or not.
In the end, the sales team have a better time picking up new clients when they’re told we list on several portals rather than just a couple.
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I appreciate its ‘free’ but surely being on 1 portal where everyone goes, and not paying a marketing person to put them on 10 makes more sense.
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DISCLAIMER: Marketing Mode Activated…
I understand where you’re coming from; life would be simple if I wanted a t-shirt and all I had available was Primark. If I wanted a gallon of milk and all I had was Tesco.
But think about the consquence as a consumer, if one company was ruling the market (Rightmove) in this case, how greedy the directors are sitting behind a screen, they wouldn’t think twice to suck out every last penny from your pocket with a smile on their face.
Now, let’s talk about the current market condition because we know our market in the UK is split up into three portals. Right Move, Zoopla and On The Market. Typically an agent will pick one or two at maximum?
Now we have FREE portals coming along, I’ve only put my eggs in one or two baskets which I’m paying for, but this is FREE meaning I have nothing to lose but everything to gain.
As a marketer, I would stick to at least ONE of the big three, but I welcome anything FREE. Let me not even get started on the SEO benefits it also brings, when someone is typing in our company name for example, and we are showing up on multiple sites. This looks good on us.
This is all my opinion as a marketer, I joined Residential People little over a month ago, and we have received probably received little over 5 leads, very low compared to our leads generated on Zoopla but we’ll take them.
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Sam who? Never heard of you. Residential People …. who? As a business, I don’t want to be taking my time up loading to web sites that my customers have never heard of, let alone ever have the need to visit. Two is enough, three is getting boring to see the same properties and four to ten is damn annoying and a big turn off. Its free, is your pitch, but absolutely pointless if my customers don’t use it.
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That’s why I like competitors like you, one of the most common feedback our company receives is ‘you guys are fast and get things done’. Generally speaking, Estate Agents are lazy, that’s a fact.
I don’t really want to explain further than how beautifully I explained above, it was explained so well, that I read it four times myself after submitting the comment.
In this example of Residential People, our feed connected within the 5-minute call, 200 odd properties went live and about 5 leads generated so far. If another portal comes along with a FREE concept I will also be the first to jump on it.
It’s called being an early adopter 🙂 we’re all entitled to our own opinion, so if you think I’m stupid for advertising my companies agency in five places rather than two… Then let’s just leave it there.
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