How much is that doggy in the window, the one with the waggly tail?

Call me whatever you like—"Mad Scientist of Proptech" is my favourite—but I know property search better than anyone else in the space. I know what works and what doesn't. For the past 14 years, I've been trying to show agents that they're paying through the nose for a system that doesn't work properly or well. 

Those who've followed the story on Twitter over the years know that I've been careful to document every claim and reckoning I've made.

I know this because I built a system to prove it: 80% of the traffic on portals is driven by one thing—the price. Eight in ten people are a fleeting, unique visit just to find out 'how much? By tracking IPs, I'm able to record visits to portals and agents' websites, and measure engagement. 

What I discovered is that people visit portals as a convenient way to find information without running the gauntlet of a pushy (pantomime villain—boo, hiss!) agent. Typically, 330 people look, and 264 of them are only there for the price. The rest are what we traditionally call applicants—the people who are actually looking to move home.

Portals are 'triffick for traffic,' and they trade off just how much traffic they generate. They market themselves as the first place people look, which is true and believable, and I won't argue with that. But—and it's a BIG 'J-Lo' but—portals are not great for specific property searches.

Here's a case in point: It took me seconds to find a property that a friend of the owner asked me to locate. They were asking the usual question, "Why hasn't my home sold? It's been on since February, and no one has come to look." At this point, I showed the friend that their friend had got it wrong—they'd picked the wrong agent to start with. 

A passive intermediary lister had simply listed the property and left it alone. As a consequence, it had been buried in the dead zone of Rightmove for the past six months, a bit like the classic joke: "Where do you hide a body? Page 2 of Google—no one looks there." The property was in the dusty recesses of the portal archives with no way of finding it using the usual portal tools.

Some people will know I built a system for search that does veracious searching. I found the property in seconds and left the friend searching the portal for a property he knows is listed—he couldn't find it, even though he knew the price, the type, the location, and even key words in the description. It just wasn't there. It is there, but it's unfindable. 

If vendors are using a passive lister to plonk property on the portals, the portals need to be up to the job. Otherwise, they're just a way of filling time, not much use for finding a specific home.

Twenty percent of serious applicants have specific needs—something in their lives that restricts their choice of homes. If the portals aren't geared up for their search, what hope is there?

🤔 Perhaps I should build a system for the 20% - it's worth £495m in fees to agents.