•  Growing number of UK portals reflects UK housing market recovery
• UK listings up 50% y-o-y on TheMoveChannel.com
• “Hard to shake” the dominance of Rightmove and Zoopla
• New portals “have to do something different”
• Enquiries on TheMoveChannel.com up 23% y-o-y

The UK housing market is on the up. It´s no secret. Sales, lending and prices are all rising. The biggest sign that UK real estate is recovering, though, is the industry´s response: new property portals and estate agents are popping up all over the internet, from the announcement of easyProperty to even Poundland´s founder starting EstatesDirect.com.

At the top are Rightmove and Zoopla, enjoying rising traffic levels. As new agent-backed portals launch to combat the dominance of the big sites, TheMoveChannel.com´s podcast discusses the state of the UK property portal industry.

Are there too many portals? Will it ever be possible to end the dominance of the big websites?

We interview Ian Spencer, Marketing Manager of real estate lead generation specialists Lead Galaxy.

Click here to listen to the full investigation. An abridged transcript follows:

House prices are up. But is the biggest sign of the UK housing recovery the number of new portals and estate agents?
Yes. I think it´s important to remember these portals don´t appear overnight. Months of planning and swarovski sets discount development have gone into them – people noticed the recovery last year and started work, knowing that a year later they´d be even stronger. Certainly, the UK economy is going to be reflected by what happens in terms of online property portals.

Confidence among homeowners looking to sell is improving too. There is certainly a market for places to advertise…

A lot of sellers have held off. If you go back two years, you wouldn´t really have been thinking about selling your house. TheMoveChannel.com on its own has seen a 50% increase in UK property listings in the last year. It follows the trend of the economy and what´s happening out there – that´s only going to be reflected by the number of sites coming online helping people to sell.

Is it possible to have too many property portals?
You can have too many anything! That´s where the internet has shone through – if you had too many people doing the cheap Oakley sunglasses, Oakley goggles,Oakley ski goggles same thing on the high street, they would go out of business. Online, it´s unlimited.

With so many portals focussing on the UK, SEO competition for the first page of Google is bound to be high, isn´t it?
It´s going to be interesting to see how that pans out. You have to look at the top three at the moment – Zoopla, Rightmove and Prime Location – which dominate a phenomenal amount of the traffic and listings within Google. But if you´ve got the money, you can compete. That´s for sure.

Zoopla and Rightmove have both seen traffic climb in 2013. How dominant are they?
You have to bear in mind that even though they´re online, they have a massive offline campaign too. You see them on TV, in the majority of the estate agents they work with. Without the high street, there wouldn´t be that many listings on Rightmove.

Several agent-backed portals, such as Property Mutual and Agents´ Mutual, are launching with the aim of tackling what they perceive to be unfair market dominance. How easy is it to do that?

In terms of organic traffic, it´s going to be hard to shake what´s there at the moment. The ones that are launching in the coming months, we don´t know what they´re doing. Is there going to be a wealth of content? Are they going to do something new? New portals have to do something different, going back to our previous podcast about SEO. TheMoveChannel.com, for example, ranks well, but we´re 15 years old and we have a lot of different kinds of listings compared to other portals.

Agents´ Mutual has a rule that clients can only advertise on one other portal, which some have speculated will only increase the dominance of market-leading sites…

With about 1,000 listings that´s quite controllable but when they get to five or six million, how would you stop someone going elsewhere?
Look at it like this: if you had a magazine charging you a lot of money to get in front of a lot of people and another magazine charging you less to get in front of fewer people, which do you choose? Maybe some people feel aggrieved, but you pay to get results.

Will we ever see the death of high street estate agents?
Without the high street, there´s no Rightmove and there´s no Zoopla, if we´re being honest. The majority of the listings on those portals are from estate agents with a presence on the high street. There are some reports that say online estate agents will provide 60 per cent of those listings in a couple of years, but these are theories and guesses. I never see the end of the high street because there are always people who want to go in and talk to someone in person, especially for selling.

With so many portals and agents, is it better to focus on a niche sector or location?
There are two aspects. If you go for something niche, you´re going to have fewer people looking, so you might not get the figures you´re looking for but it might be easier to get in front of them.

The other option, like TheMoveChannel.com, is to be more comprehensive. Does that work?
Comprehensive, but well thought out and planned! Now, compared to this time last year, our enquiries are up 23 per cent, so having a wide range has worked. It goes back to the planning phase, changing to what your user wants. If you do that, you can go for a lot of things under one umbrella, but you´ve got to give people an easy way to find them, otherwise they´ll go somewhere else.

Does the future look bright for the property portal industry? Will there be more portals to come?Yes. And as competition comes along, new ideas come along and the audience grows. So if you´re looking to sell a house it´s going to get a bigger audience, and if you´re looking for a house, it´s going to be easier to find one.

Notes to Editors
Founded in 1999, TheMoveChannel.com is the leading independent website for international property, with more than 800,000 listings in over 100 countries around the world, marketed on behalf of agents, developers and private owners.

The website address ishttp://www.TheMoveChannel.com and the office address is 24 Jack’s Place, Corbet Place, Spitalfields, London, E1 6NN.
Contact Dan Johnson on 0207 952 7650 for further information.