Property Portals

Meet the CEOs — Rightmove vs Zoopla vs Agents’ Mutual — @peterknightblog’s four-i

This is well worth reading, if you’re into this emerging portal war story.

An observation:

US rental portal, ApartmentList, invests in 3D panoramas on listings

Apartment List is very smart and very successful. But this is little more than an expensive gimmick. People will always go to view, and it’s unlikely the panorama would help filter down the shortlist more.

New UK Property Portals aplenty — Are @Plentific, @FindProperly, @Locatable or @AgentsMutual viable?

Everybody wants to build a property portal:

Estate Agents who are annoyed someone else is making money; techies who find the home…

Housing.com and Commonfloor raise silly money in push to dominate India’s property listings market

Housing.com (formerly Housing.in before they spent over $1m on the .com and the coolest phone number in India) was already one of the best/easiest-to-use property…

Kangaroom, the spare room site quietly shaping up to be a worldbeater — @KangaroomHQ

If you’re going to build a new portal, start in a niche like spare rooms, aggregate stock from other sites like Spareroom and build up a loyal following.

Trulia rumoured to be buying Move — Benzinga

It’s sort of a no-brainer. Trulia and Move are losing the US portal wars, with Zillow out-manoeuvring both.

Move makes a lot of money. But Trulia is worth more (market cap). So Trulia buys Move, uses Move’s cashflow to step up…

Australian Real Estate Agents to create their own ‘Agents’ Mutual’

Is the UK movement become a global phenomenon?

It’s strange that this essentially exists in the US, with MLSs, but because they are so fragmented, they’ve allowed new companies like Zillow…

What Property Portals can learn from Priceline’s (owner of Booking.com and Kayak) offer to buy OpenTable for $2.6bn

Like the convergence of TV, mobile, phone and broadband, companies that book commodity flights and hotels have long looked for that…