Charging up the Portal Market in Spain.
With the amount of property in Spain in the hands of foreign owners and an unfathomable amount of estate agents on the ground, portal advertising has become the norm and an essential expense for agents working within the resale market.
RightMove Overseas, Zoopla/Prime Location and Place in the Sun have carved themselves a serious market share that reflects the strength of their brand in the UK, whilst locally established but predominantly English speaking portals Kyero and ThinkSpain have been around since the dawn of the online era.
Some agents advertise on one or two, some agents with big enough budgets advertise on all of them. It’s worth noting that unlike most European countries the Spanish real estate market is wholly unregulated and property is listed with multiple estate agents, there is only a very small amount of exclusivity and two way and even three way sales commission splits between agents are entirely normal.
Looking to continental European portals, Green Acres from France leads the way for French speaking buyers and most of the large German portals such as Immowelt seem to have a token offerings on their site of overseas properties.
Within Spain and whilst multilingual but predominately focused on the Spanish user, Idealista and Pisos were born from the concept of private sales but now accept property from agencies on the site, which means high subscription paying agents are competing for the same screen space with private sellers and renters who use the service for nothing.
Most agencies in Spain are multilingual and need to generate a high number of leads to convert into sales, so in order to play the numbers game they have to advertise on a high number of these portals or strong advertising within those countries or Google Adwords.
The cost of advertising on one or two portals is high, could you imagine having to advertise on 6 or 7 to reach your clients, add in some print media, Google Adwords or SEO to your budget. The cost of acquisition of a sale is climbing and showing no signs of scaling in the near future
In the summer of 2015 the notion of a realistically priced, multi language property portal was discussed by a team of IT and Web Marketing professionals that had been working exclusively in the property business for some years. Once a clear vision had been put in place they went out into the field and spoke with as many agents as would engage on the topic of their portal experiences in order to find out what the agents really required from their portal partnerships and what feedback they had had from their clients that had used the portals in question.
The feedback followed a pretty depressing theme , irrespective of the price or prestige of the portal. Cost of acquisition was high, leads were farmed out to any agency in the area with similar property to the clients requirements, leads were so cold to the extent that they appeared to be false, private sales of the same property were listed next to the paid listing by the agent, data transfer support was weak, customer support was non-existent.
The feedback was startling, eye opening and highly motivating for the team.
Buscadom was born and the team went away to create the portal which will be the future of property in Spain for all languages and for users and agents alike.
A resales property portal which will not be open to private sales, which will provide users direct contact to the listing agent of the property they wish to enquire about, which will advertise on all online and offline media giving the agents greater exposure for their investment.
A dedicated account manager for a dedicated area who will actually live in the area and will know the names of the agencies and the agents who work within them. A property portal that will not be translated, but will have content provided by natives of the countries we can provide the service to, ensuring an authentic and honest tone to any user from any major country.
A website design that has drawn inspiration from across the globe to ensure a seamless user experience and functionality that will bring the enquiry to the agents quicker and more precisely.
The future of the Spanish portal market isn’t with the companies that use the strength of the brand to charge a high price or the legend of success passed by to market it on.
It’s with a company that is on the ground talking to agents and buyers and tailoring the portal experience to their needs.
The future is the 29th of February and the future is Buscadom.
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