We all know that most househunters now search online for their next property, and rather than first visiting local agents’ sites, they plump for the property portals – dominated these days by a handful of websites.
Rightmove remains the most visited UK property portal, Zoopla has consolidated its number two position over the past few years, while Onthemarket.com (OTM) has secured third spot. But there is a new challenger aiming to gain control of the homebuyer audience.
The new challenger, Boomin, is led by executive chairman and founder, Michael Bruce.
Tell us what you think:
Comments (8)
There is no room at the inn for another portal to succeed.
It will not get the big players that keep the likes of RM & Z going and those with OTM haven’t forgotten about COMMISSARY.
It will be down to agents involvement to make this succeed. Not fancy advertising to the public or are we going to see a concerted propaganda machine working on agents customers, the ones that are not contracted to Boomin. If they go that route, they will fail when the public get wise to it is a cross selling outfit. Agents don’t forget you must disclose fee’s you earn to customers.
If agents want to still sell the same amount of homes they all need to support one portal, promote it, post to it first and push it to No1
then they can drop the expensive Rightmove
You are right, as agents we actually have the power to change things if we don’t like them. People will go where properties are advertised at the end of the day. We have made RM the beast it is and we could take that away if we wished, but, as usual in this industry we would all rather use it as a stick to beat each other with rather than be cohesive in our approach to playing the portals off against one another to ensure pricing remains realistic.
They will succeed in making money at the expense of agents.
They will only succeed if agents are daft enough to back it.
Put the near on £500 per month into facebook adds and target valuations, you will see A FAR greater return on investment.
What £500 per month are you talking about. BOOMIN arent charging a penny until 2024. PS are you still on Wrongmove? Answers on a postcard please.
Free until 2024? Who told you that?
Depends what succeed is…
I suspect we will know when the company floats, or is Acquired by some other company!
Still good luck to them; as with all other property related services, we have a choice to use them or not.
(PS very funning, RM number 1, Z number 2 and OTM have secured 3rd spot… hahaha… so as we were and have always been)