Marc Palmer

We’re currently selling our house and trying to find a new one to buy. It’s been six years since we last did this and a lot has changed – back then almost nobody really used the internet to send out house details, estate agents didn’t even know what email was usually.

However, given that property search sites and estate agent sites have been developing for a long time now I am still disappointed by how backward and un-user friendly these services are. There are lots of big property search sites – Rightmove, Propertyfinder, Primelocation and their ilk. They are all pretty much the same. Only one deserves notable mention – Propertyfinder – because it supports RSS feeds of your saved searches. A revolution in the world of property sales!

Rightmove is apparently the market leader:

• With Safari browser on Mac you can never get it to remember you, so you always have to log in to view saved searches – its quicker to just retype the search, but very boring
• No RSS (even if there was it would probably require a login which it couldn’t remember for me)
• You can’t search for multiple property types, i.e. House OR Character Property. Why assume people only want one kind of property?

Propertyfinder seems like rightmove with a bit more intelligence:

• It supports RSS feeds
• It provides a lot more useful info related to your search area and the properties – names of local towns, market information such as average time to offer acceptance, average prices in the area, and free past sale price information
• Doesn’t allow you to restrict your search to properties added in the last N days, you always get them all (unless you use RSS)

Primelocation is the worst of the bunch – the interface is ugly and clunky, they make you log in to access certain features, and they don’t seem to have nearly as much property – at least in the areas we are looking.

All of these fail to address basic and simple usability criteria:

1. Allow me to specify multiple property types in a search
2. Record from the agents more structured common data, so that you can search on this information too – i.e. is bathroom downstairs or not (in the UK at least this is often an issue), is there parking (off-road, on-street, on-street with permit etc), when was the house put on the market (sensitive issue I imagine but important to buyers)
3. Record structured locality specific data, for example in a hilly area, the properties should have extra fields that you can search when searching those areas specifically – i.e. “Has level gardens”
4. Capture the house build year, and allow searching on it. The distinction between “New” and “Resale” homes is daft, if people want a victorian/period house they always have to skip through dozens of “new” houses that are being resold. It is an inadequate distinction.
5. Show hit counts for the properties – show which are the most popular, the number of people who have viewed the full details. They have this information, the estate agents see it!

Many in the industry would undoubtedly say that much of that information is not in the vendor’s interest to publish, but the industry needs to sort itself out and start serving the people buying houses, especially with property at such high prices now.

The bottom line is, don’t waste peoples’ time sending them to properties they will not be interested in. People who have imagination to see beyond limitations will tailor their searches to be wider than those who want very specific things.

The laughable thing is that the agents waste their own time and money sending out inappropriate details to buyers because they don’t capture the buyer’s desires properly.

Plus, with our house on the market, its hard to see in this day what value an Estage Agent really adds when you are selling. About the only thing I can think of is (a) high street presence, and (b) somebody to show the buyers around your house. With future generations possibly more at home on their computers than looking through shop windows, I think direct sale via online sites like House Web are going to increase massively. There’s such a lot of money involved, I’m not sure I’d trust any Estate Agent, even if they were family!

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