Marketing Online – Marketing Strategies – Marketing Tips – Internet Business

Traditional property portals, like Rightmove, prioritise page views over speed of access to information. Their business model is based on fees from estate agents and advertising. Page views is a key driver of CPM (Cost Per Mile). CPM is calculated as the cost of running and ad divided by the number of page views.

Users searching for properties browse an average of fifteen (15) pages, excluding registration and login ones. On the other end of user-friendliness sites like www.homesforsalelive.co.uk just show the available properties in the first and only page per location. Their offering consists of a selection of properties from different estate agents. They lack however filtering capabilities as traditional portals.

Property portals offer a number of check boxes, radio buttons, drop down menus, text fields, lists and all these have abbreviations that allow the selection of properties by price or number of bedrooms for instance. At this point most of us are thinking would it not be quicker just to pop down to the local estate agent?

Some property websites do not just have a filter page, some have several in the format of a “help wizard” which only helps in prolonging the search! A search for houses to buy in Leicester takes around 75 seconds at http://leicester.homesforsalelive.co.uk and more than four minutes at Rightmove. In between those extremes, Naea takes around two filtering pages and two minutes to find houses to buy in the area.

What most of us want is a site we can go to and just to see a list of properties for a preferred area with relevant information. If need be, we may want to narrow our search down but not through several filter pages. “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”. This objective is the first thing property listing websites should meet.