Is OnTheMarket.com set to change how we buy and sell a home?
Is the new national property portal, OnTheMarket.com set to threaten Rightmove/Zoopla's online dominance in home selling and buying in 2015?
A new property search service with hundreds of thousands of UK properties to buy or rent will be launching in January 2015.That new service will be called OnTheMarket.com. It is by far the most serious challenger in recent years to the portals duopoly operated by Rightmove plc and Zoopla Property Group plc. Indeed, many commentators and agents believe that it has the power to disrupt that duopoly permanently.
An unprecedented number of selling and lettings agents all over the UK are deciding to move the advertising of their properties away from one of the current portal leaders and to display them all at OnTheMarket.com. That means it will immediately become a "must view" place to search for property, not least because the vast majority of the properties on the portal will have been effectively removed from Rightmove or Zoopla/Primelocation.
The importance of the "user experience" will be paramount. The property search will be slick, simple, fast and state-of-the-art. No clutter from irritating and distracting third party ads. No spam mail. No spurious online valuation tools. No unnecessary information over-load. Just hundreds of thousands of UK properties to buy or rent at all price points all across the UK. Every property you'll see at OnTheMarket.com will be on the market with a locally-based estate or letting agent with expertise on the ground. Property seekers, vendors and landlords alike will have the confidence that they can speak face-to-face with the estate and letting agents who are marketing any of the properties.
As an additional reassurance of the quality of its offering, OnTheMarket.com will be the only portal to be endorsed by both the National Association of Estate Agents and the Association of Residential Letting Agents.
There are still two to three months to go before OnTheMarket.com is due to go live. For the time being, its management is keeping under wraps some of the features of the portal for obvious reasons. But there is already such momentum behind the growth of agent support and already such a buzz around it that one thing is clear: if you're in the market to move home next January, you won't see all the properties on the market in the UK if you don't search at OnTheMarket.com.
We will keep you updated with news on what could prove to be 'a potential seismic change in the housing market' as we get it.
Tony Wing DipsSurv FNAEA MRICS
Sales Director
Lincoln Office
Tel: 01522 538888
Email: tonywing@robert-bell.org
Twitter: @robertbellandco
