Comments on: Counting Rental Listings On UK Property Portals

By: Amarjit Singh Kullar

Amarjit Singh Kullar — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 16:11:34 +0000

Great idea for properties findings. But as said earlier duplicates can be avioded and the latest ones can be posted by reviewing it periodically.

By: Ciara

Ciara — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 17:16:00 +0000

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!

By: Look4aProperty

Look4aProperty — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 14:56:02 +0000

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.

By: Look4aProperty

Look4aProperty — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 12:55:34 +0000

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 More ads doesn’t necessarily mean more information, it typically just means out of date information.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.

By: Ciara

Ciara — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 08:18:59 +0000

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?

By: Richard

Richard — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 23:09:34 +0000

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.