Popular overseas blog Nubricks.com recently announced a new advertising platform dubbed "Launch Newswire" which includes an "unlimited usage" package costing £500/year. Nubricks claims to have over 60,000 unique visitors per month and 12,000 subscribers to its email blast newsletters. They've also recently launched "Property Ladder", a free weekend service where users can showcase overseas property for free, subject to editorial discretion.
Property Week's campaign to find the UK's best investment deal broker is coming to a close. Voting closes this week. So far Savills and LSH are in the lead
Very big news today in the world of 2.0 property search as Nestoria announces they're now powering The Independent property search on their just launched revamped website:
"It’s great to see a traditional brand embracing a web2.0 approach generally and working with a small start up like us," according to the Nestoria blog. So far to my knowledge this is the biggest media partnership deal for any European 2.0 property search engine.
is confusing. Nevertheless, I've found a great source of independent commentary ironically out of Barcelona. Gary Stewart, CEO of Goa Internet Services who produce Nuroa, the Euro property search engine offers excellent commentary focusing intently on the race between Barack and Hillary. Checking Huffington Post and Drudge Report, the two most influential blogs in American politics and it seems like the blog world are leaning towards Hilary, but then I just got back from Canada and watched a lot of American TV, and the mainstream media is definitely riding Obama's d_^k.
Of course Ron Paul's being blowing up our interweb for the past year. Unfortunately for him it seems computer geeks are just too lazy too vote, even though his politics seem to make a lot of sense to a lot of people.
Merry Christmas and a Happy 2008 everybody; I know a little late, but better late than never.
Well what a great way to start my 2008 blogging adventure. Here's an interview with the incredulous property porn king Ben Brandt, owner and editor of the influential Rat and Mouse, London's property blog:
Tell me Ben, what prompted you to start blogging about property?A very intense 2004/2005, in which I sold a house and bought another house and a flat during a momentary weakness in the market. Over the course of a year I experienced just about every property-related stress you could think of. I accepted an offer from a nutter with no money whatsoever. I was gazumped on a purchase. Somebody tried to gazunder me on the sale. One of my estate agents was a crook. My solicitor vanished. And my purchaser’s solicitor failed to release funds in time for the system to clear them… late on a Friday night. But after a year of following the market intensely online, I couldn’t “let go”. These were also the very early days of blogging. I was fascinated by what Nick Denton had done with Gawker, and really wanted to try blogging as a form. The Rat and Mouse was a kind of experiment… the coming-together of two fascinations. I never really imagined I’d still be doing it even a year later.
How do you go about choosing the articles you link to and write about on R&M?
Firstly, I try to provide all the dry statistics… indices and data relating to the property market… but delivered with a sense of humour. The property market’s emotional… there’s surprisingly little science or sense to it, so I don’t believe a conventional, straight-faced approach is necessarily more appropriate. Secondly, I try to pick up on the kind of stories that might stand a chance of being discussed. Property’s an obsession for Londoners, both renters and owners, and during both boom times and bust. I trawl through most of the day’s newspapers – from the UK and abroad – for relevant or interesting stories. I think a lot of people come to the Rat and Mouse because it saves them the work. I also respond to the mailbag… I get a lot of email.What has been the most interesting observation you have had since you started blogging?
Everybody needs to blame somebody. The vendor blames the agent. The agent blames the vendor. The landlord blames the tenant. The tenant blames the landlord. The CML blame the Government. Everybody blames Foxtons.What is your assessment of the London property market?
It’s overpriced. Having said that, so are Bentleys, but don’t expect to see them on sale for £10,000 any time soon.How important do you think R&M is to the property market?
It’s not important, but it’s read, and I’m very happy about that. The Times and the FT have written some very nice things about the Rat and Mouse, traffic continues to grow, and it never ceases to surprise me how many people have heard of the blog, even if a small minority think it’s about rodents.What are your goals for R&M?
I didn’t start with goals, but I’m beginning to think I need to formulate some. The Rat and Mouse is becoming quite expensive to run (in terms of bandwidth), so I guess my goals are to capitalise on a few years’ hard work, arrange some advertising or sponsorship and continue to grow traffic. I’ve had some interesting offers recently that have shown the value of “the brand”. The Rat and Mouse is the top search result when Google-ing “property blog”, and has nicely targeted traffic.Do you consider yourself a professional blogger?
No, but I’m a professional writer/broadcaster in my “other life”… so journalism isn’t a mystery to me. I’m not sure how many professional bloggers there really are in the UK. There are a few venture-funded bloggers…Has anybody ever offered you money to blog about something?
Yes. Frequently. Without exception, the answer’s “no”. There’s always ad space, however, if anyone’s interested…Best / worst aspects to blogging?
Just knowing I’m being read by more people than I could shake hands with in a day is a real thrill. The worst aspect is undoubtedly comment spam. In the thousands. Daily. “I am much enjoying your rats, and will please be telling my friends, thankyou, click for tits-pix…”And thank you Ben for continuing to entertain and inform us after all these years. Blogs come and go quite frequently and property blogging is time consuming requiring a great deal of dedication and focus. No doubt about it, Ben B. is one of the unsung heroes of the London property market. Let's continue to give him all of the support that we can ...
Thanks, Harvey, for the chance to talk a little about the Rat and Mouse. It’s been fun. Keep up the good work on Renthusiast.
OneMove.TV is set to launch any day now with "small town Canadian" Julie Madison and the very cosmopolitan Georgina Burnett playing host to industry news, gossip and entertainment. Sign up to the service before December 15th and you may be a lucky iphone winner.
I know I'll be watching!
Not only does he have the biggest pagerank (;
but Art (the artist) Krymski, the genius behind Extate.com was recently nominated at Esquire magazine's prestigious Man At The Top Awards for Best New Idea.
Art found himself up against some pretty hefty competition including billionaire entrepreneur Philip Green and Mark Price who currently heads up the retail giant Waitrose. Art eventually lost to Simon Woodroffe, founder of YO! Sushi and the newly launched Yotel.
Hearty congratulations to Artemi, Doug and the rest of the Extate team. We're expecting very big news from Extate over the weekend. Stay pinged to Renthusiast, for the exclusive as and when it happens.
Magic Radio the number one station in London announced this morning, their partnership with the newly revamped Oodle Network, to power classified search on the Magic FM website. “Radio Stations, with their strong local consumer base, have a great opportunity with online classifieds, by working with Oodle and offering free online classified listings to their users Magic have a tremendous opportunity to grab a significant share of this fast developing market.”
claims Duncan Dunlop, General Manager Oodle UK. although he did not elaborate on how exactly Magic would make money from the deal. Oodle plans to share display and PPC revenues generated from the classifieds with Magic. "Classifieds market is worth over 3bn in UK and is the fastest growing segment on line so if they can secure even a small market share, revenues will look after themselves,"
according to Duncan “We have found that our listeners are avid classifieds users, we’re excited about letting our 2m weekly listeners have the chance to post their listings for free, as well provide them with access to the largest number of classifieds listings in London.”
said James Walden, Business Development Director at Magic Radio.
This is the second major media partnership Oodle has scored in recent months. Earlier this year, they announced a partnership with Sun.co.uk, the online home of the UK's biggest tabloid and a top 50 website according to Alexa rankings
Got the scoop on the brand new Bizzlo.com, digg-like service for the investment and business community. Bizzlo focuses exclusively on business and investment articles.
Sign up for an account and you can post links to any story you want to profile, any time.
After today's unauthorized breach of the Rightmove September Index [pdf], the company has now decided to release the full report, in order to avoid "potentially misleading and selective reporting of the full September 2007 report."
HIGHLIGHTS:
Rightmove claim that average asking prices have fallen by 2.5%, but blame the fall on the HIP kerfuffle as opposed to overall market conditions.
Greater London average asking prices’ dropped by 2.5% in September to £384,439[Full PDF]
from £394,268 in August. The last time we saw such a negative figure was in August 2004, when prices dropped 4.3 % in a month. However, the lower number of ‘higher priced’ 4+ bedroom properties coming onto the market after the August 1st implementation of HIPs does exacerbate the average price drop, though the London market has fewer large properties than the rest of the country. Distortion of normal market forces will continue into next year due to HIPs implementation and phasing according to bedroom numbers.
So much for the cooling market, it certainly ain't cooling online, with Extate's new money and Rightmove's expanding profit margin, certainly the right place to be investing - at least for the moment:
[Reuters]
Rightmove Plc, which runs Britain's busiest property website, reported on Friday 13.2 million pounds ($26.5 million) in underlying operating profit for the six months to end June, as the number of advertisers rose by 26 percent and visits to its property website increased by 58 percent.
"We expect to generate a similar level of year-on-year growth in the second half ... Property agents have to sell houses in a slowing market, and so they are doing promotions ... We do not see any noticeable deterioration in our business," Managing Director Ed Williams told reporters.
He said the length of time properties were staying on the market was rising, however.
Britain's housing market has slowed as five interest rate increases in less than a year to 5.75 percent and expectations of another hike to 6 percent damp buyer interest.
Rightmove earns subscription fees from its customers such as estate agents, rental agents and new home developers in exchange for allowing them to advertise properties, new developments and rental properties.[more]
Yup, that's right, we made the Rat and Mouse headlines this morning by calling out Liam Bailey over the weekend. Who's next, Guardian, Times, Evening Standard, Metro, c'mon guys we know you're reading, show your love (:
Thanks to Ben for the support, but more importantly, it's nice to see we have backing in our argument, given the Telegraph article Rat and Mouse also linked to this morning. Ironically, that article also quotes extensively from Liam, but this time he's supporting the theory that the foreign buyers are propping up the London market, also verified by Land Registry figures released today and the fact that London is apparently set to break another record in bonuses this year in spite of the credit crunch. Who knows, maybe we were a little premature in calling out Liam like that, since the Telegraph article shows that he was putting together the Prime Central London Index. Maybe he didn't have all his figures together before FT went to press on Saturday; or maybe he was just plain misquoted, or maybe the FT was perhaps maybe guilty of a little sensationalism, tabloid style journalism? Could it be? Maybe? Nah ... not the FT, say it ain't so... please
Nestoria's co-branded search program is taking off, the latest partner being none other than Real Estate TV. The co-branded search program has linked with mainly alternative media organizations so far, including Rat and Mouse, Londonist and HouseReview. Nestoria's search aggregation has come under criticism for crawling established search portals, but recently, their search results appear to be generating more results from generic estate agents.
Unfortunately, I don't have an online subscription, but the teaser reads quite lovely ...
JUNE is National Homeownership Month in America. National Foreclosure Month would be more apt. Some corners of the mortgage market—notably subprime loans aimed at those with poor credit records—have a nasty case of dry rot.…
In the midst of Rosie vs Donald, Trump visited Letterman last week to once again, tell his side of the story. The most interesting exchange:
Trump: I help somebody and she calls me a pimp ...
Letterman: but you wouldn't mind being a pimp, if everything else went away
Trump: nods head in apparent agreement.
In more Trump news, peep this interview, where Don Jr describes his Dad as "the brand" and that "there are times when it may be exaggerated, but it's pretty much him... hopefully we can perpetuate that."
Season 6 of Trump's Apprentice premiered last night on NBC
Last weeks controversial Mail on Sunday article, claimed Rightmove.co.uk was selling confidential data to the Valuation Tax office. In today's edition of Estate Agency News, Rightmove's commercial director Miles Shipside defended the allegation, claiming the MoS article was "an attack on the estate agency profession":
The Valuation Office is one of the largest employers of professional surveyors in the UK and naturally uses comparable evidence from a wide variety of sources, including, most importantly, the sale prices from the Land Registry. Like other surveyors, Valuation Office employees search on Rightmove as well as other property portals and estate agents’ own sites. The Valuation Office approached Rightmove to license our Market Comparable Reporting Tool, which is widely used by Rightmove member agents. Using this tool helps the Valuation Office achieve high standards of accuracy and saves them time and money that would otherwise be spent searching properties advertised online and on agents’ own websites. I can reassure our members and their clients that Rightmove does not pass any property data to the Valuation Office and that they have no access to personal client data. All the information which the Valuation Office has access to has been freely available in the public domain whether on Rightmove, other property portals or agents’ own websites.
Popular and long-running blogsite Londonist (part of New York based Gothamist LLC) announced their property search partnership with Nestoria a few days ago.
Launched in October 2004, Real Estate TV (Sky channel 279) is celebrating its 2nd birthday by hosting Real Estate TV Live on the 18 – 19 November, at the NEC Center in Birmingham; and by encouraging its viewers to "Become a property expert in one day" and even having a "Property Factor" open audition contest to become a presenter on the channel.
Sounds like its going to be a fun weekend!
[related post via Nubricks]
Former Apprentice winner and author
Talking about a bubble implies a sudden burst, and real estate does not work that way. You don't go to sleep one night with your house worth half a million dollars and wake up to find it's lost half its value. Also, the real estate market is a regional phenomenon based on all kinds of factors: migration to or from an area, job growth and local economies. So while there is no bubble, there are areas in the U.S. that are experiencing corrections that will continue over the next six to 24 months. There are also markets that will appreciate over that same period. The trick is keeping your cool and taking advantage of the opportunities.
Property software company Vebra (which was sold to Guardian Media Group last month), announces the launch of Thinkproperty.com, which they claim will give Rightmove "a run for it's money" BricksnClicks reports that Vebra MD Stephen McCluskey, has said that an injection of funds from the new owners will give ThinkProperty.com a new lease of life; furthermore with Guardian backing and exposure, expect to see "a really massive ramping-up of consumer activity" between now and January, according to McCluskey.
