Counting Rental Listings On UK Property Portals
On the right hand side of our blog we have a few links to websites we recommend London renters to use for rental property search. These sites deserve to be on the pedestal for several reasons but also just because they contain more rental listings than others.
We thought it would be a good idea to write down the number of property listings each portal has in one specific London postcode, and then come back to see where all of them stand after a few months.
Number of residential property ads in SW3 (Chelsea and Brompton) on more popular UK property portals:
PROPERTIES
IN SW3 PORTAL
1916 Findaproperty.com
1874 Primelocation.com
1340 Globrix
1076 Nestoria
1066 TrovitHomes
1000*** Rightmove
645 Zoomf
625 DotHomes
502 ThinkProperty.com
342 HotProperty.co.uk
225 Look4aProperty.co.uk
209 Zoopla
202 Fish4Homes
200**** PropertyFinder.co.uk
41 TheLettingSite.co.uk
30 PropertyIndex.com
?* PropertyLive.co.uk
?** Enormo
13.4.2009
*Estate agents’ owned website does not allow searching for properties from only one specific postcode (they suggest we look at all the offers within 1 mile radius as well).
**Postcode search not available.
***The site says 1000+ but lists exactly 1000 properties.
****The site says 200+ results but lists exactly 200 properties.
Everybody uses a different definition of the size of areas, “sw3″ in this case. Most use rectangulars, not the actual boundaries of the area. So you can hardly compare the portals against each other. You can still compare them against themselves over time though.
I think what you count is results (listings, ads), There are quite some properties listed more than once from either different estate agents or portals (in case of search engines like Dothomes, Trovit, Nestoria, Enormo). I just want to make sure you know what you’re counting. You use the terms ‘property’ and ‘results’ interchangeable.
Hotproperty, look4aproperty would be a good addition.
Thank you for the comment, Richard!
I’ve rephrased the title so that it would not lead anyone to think the duplicates were not counted.
It would be great if they could filter the ads someday so that we would be seeing only one ad for one property at first (by the one who put it up first?!), and then open the others, if interested. More ads for the same property usually means more information, sometimes even different price. That is why I thought the more listings, the better.
Do portals generate the postcode if it is not provided?
You will naturally see a great deal of duplication on some of the sites listed above. Often they do not have a direct relationship with the agent and will be taking data from a great many places and removing the duplications is technically a different task. More ads doesn’t necessarily mean more information, it typically just means out of date information.
The earlier comment is right, accurate postcode searching can be a complex thing and I’d bet most sites use slightly different methods so accurate comparisons are difficult. If a postcode is not provided on an advert we would not add one, it’s really the responsibility of our client agents to provide this information although for New Homes that can sometimes be difficult.
Forgot to say you may want to keep an eye on our blog and add it to our What We Read section, up to you!
http://blog.look4aproperty.com/
We will be launching a few interesting initiatives over the coming months.
Cheers.
Thanks for taking time to comment – I see what you mean now. The kind of duplication that comes from one site crawling other portals does sound a bit messy. I am sure they have very good filtering systems but we should keep them separate from those that get listings from the agents.
L4AP – we’ll feed your blog to our News page so that we won’t miss any of your important announcements!
Great idea for properties findings. But as said earlier duplicates can be avioded and the latest ones can be posted by reviewing it periodically.