On Monday 26 January 2015, a new property portal – OnTheMarket.com – launched. The arrival of this brand new portal is a very exciting development for the property market.
The portal is run by Agents’ Mutual, which is made of a membership of over 2,000 property agency firms, amounting to 4,000 offices. It is envisaged that the membership will grow significantly once the portal goes live. The motivation of the portal is to deliver the best user experience for prospective tenants, with results produced clearly and in an uncluttered way with no pop-ups or third party advertising as is found on the other major portals.
To give the portal a chance of establishing a meaningful presence, each member agent will only be allowed to display properties on one other major portal. As such, we at Martin & Co Chelmsford undertook a detailed investigation into our own property portal data, looking at numbers of phone calls and email enquiries generated from both Rightmove and Zoopla. Further analysis into the quality of leads, as well as the conversion of leads received to successful lets / sales was also looked at in detail.
In conclusion, we decided that that the best portal for Martin & Co Chelmsford to appear on, as well as OnTheMarket.com, would be Rightmove. Rightmove not only delivers more enquiries, but the quality of the enquiries are, in our opinion, higher than those received from Zoopla.
Rightmove is, in our opinion, the market leader, ranked 8th in the list of the most viewed websites in the UK, well ahead of Zoopla at 35th. Google has announced that it is the most searched for business in the UK, thus adding further evidence that Rightmove is the right choice.
We believe the combination of our own website, www.chelmsford.martin.com, together with OnTheMarket.com, the new entrant with all the publicity that will ensue, as well as Rightmove, the most established and dominant portal in the market, will give our clients properties unrivalled exposure in respect of online marketing.
As of 26th January 2015, properties being marketed by Martin & Co Chelmsford will no longer appear on Zoopla.
At Martin & Co Chelmsford, we firmly believe that this is an exciting time for the property market and we believe OnTheMarket.com will be of long-term benefit for all those with an interest in renting property in our local area.
If you have any questions regarding the above, please feel free to contact me.
