8th November 2008

Choosing Where To List Your Property For Sale

GlobalEdge has some very sage advice about how to choose a property portal to advertise your properties on. You can see their article HERE.

Go through their points and you will see that FranceHouseHunt does extremely well.

GlobalEdge suggest the 4 main criteria for choosing a property portal as:

  • Consumer Marketing & Traffic
  • Content
  • Design & Navigation
  • Business Model
Lets take each in turn and see how FranceHouseHunt compares:
Consumer Marketing and Traffic
GlobalEdge says:
In our opinion, the best way to evaluate whether a property portal will generate leads is to ask yourself what your potential buyers might search for on Google, search for the phrase and see which portals show up in the search results. Natural search results provide a better indicator than paid search in our opinion, as the results are generally clicked on more and do not disappear when budgets change or competitors outbid you.
Have a go, go to Google and type in the most likely phrase that someone in the USA or UK is going to use to search for property on Google - try ‘property for sale in france’ for example, or you could also try ‘houses for sale in france’. Note who is number 1, yes us. FranceHouseHunt. This is a natural search result, NOT a paid search result.
So, on to the second main criteria on how to choose a property portal.
Content
GlobalEdge says:
Content is important. Without it, buyers have little to look at and will soon leave a website, perhaps never to return. Property listings are in our opinion more important than editorial content. Buyers want to search for property, compare houses, prices, locations and facilities. Check if portals have a good breadth of property content to give consumers choice.  
FranceHouseHunt has well over 12,000 properties for consumers to compare, and unlike other property portals has more photographs and information on a listing (when the advertiser chooses to list that information). We have information like whether or not agency fees are included, what type of drainage the property has etc. So, we score pretty well in that category too.
The third criteria for choosing a property portal.
Navigation and Design
GlobalEdge says:
On the internet, buyers are only one click away from the competition. If they get lost or frustrated, they will leave. Try to search for property in the areas where you are selling property. How difficult is it? If you find it difficult to find what you want, then your customers will too and this should raise a question mark about the portal’s ability to deliver leads for you.
FranceHouseHunt navigation is extremely simple (too simple?), we have found that consumers searching for property for sale in France primarily use 2 searches: price or location. To that end we have both types of searches displayed prominently on the front page with lesser used searches as Quick Links (to chateaux for sale for example).
So we think we do quite well on that subject too, although we are planing to add a more comprehensive search facility soon.
And on to the fourth and final criteria.
Business Model
GlobalEdge says:

Price and payment terms are factors in any business decision. If a portal offers cost per lead or commission share, you should consider them more favourably. However, portals that charge monthly can have much more effective marketing so, in our opinion, the business model should always be a secondary factor in your analysis. If the product and the marketing are right for your customer profile, then you should definitely consider paying monthly.  On the best sites you may also want to look at enhanced or high-traffic listings that put your properties and brand above your competitors, as this can be a very effective lead generation tactic.

This is our favourite subject…as we are TOTALLY FREE your cost per lead is going to be very low.

Some other important factors we think should be considered when choosing a property portal that GlobalEdge hasn’t mentioned are:

Does your property portal advertise YOU as well as your properties - does each listing have a link to YOUR website?

Quality of leads - I have spoken already of this in a previous post, but it is worth mentioning again. Where do the leads generated come from? Are they quality leads? How are people finding the property portal, are they typing in search terms to do with property or are they searching for French recipes or metric calculators?

 

In conclusion then, taking the criteria specified FranceHouseHunt is one of the best French property portals on which to list your French properties for sale (after all some of the biggest immobiliers in France are advertising on FranceHouseHunt).

 

If you want to list YOUR properties for sale on FranceHouseHunt please click HERE.

 

posted in General, The Estate Agency Business In France | 1 Comment

25th October 2008

Best Of The Free French Property Portals - FRANCEHOUSEHUNT

In a recent survey conducted by GlobalEdge, FranceHouseHunt has come 17th in a table of the top free property portals.
See the article HERE. 

Look a little closer though and we actually come out 1st for advertising French properties for FREE (we’re the top FREE portal displaying solely French properties). We were only beaten by French Entree, 1st for French Property and My French House, all of which are commission share sites (and I’m sure we will come out even further ahead when they update the results).

If you want to cut your costs during this difficult economic time then you are going to have to seriously consider changing your advertising strategy.
Why pay out money to sites when you can have quality enquiries and the same functionality as the largest portal sites at NO COST TO YOU WHATSOEVER? We don’t charge for email enquiries (they are direct with you), we don’t charge commission, we don’t have a monthly/weekly/daily charge, we don’t even charge for featured ads! It really is TOTALLY free….and you can have as many properties advertised as you like.

Work out what your cost/enquiry and the profit/enquiry is with these other sites, you might be quite surprised at how bad it is.
After all, that is why FranceHouseHunt was started, because we got sick of paying high commissions to sites, and paying extortionate fees to advertise on portals. 

It makes good economic sense to get your properties up on FranceHouseHunt as soon as possible. 

To add a free property advert to FranceHouseHunt please click HERE.
To see all the existing listings on FranceHouseHunt, click HERE.
To see all reduced price properties, click HERE.

posted in The Estate Agency Business In France | 0 Comments