Fotocasa Launches National Promotion Campaign for New Neighbourhood Guide

The Adevinta-owned Spanish property portal Fotocasa has announced the launch of a new neighbourhood guide along with a national television ad campaign to promote it.

The new feature includes neighbourhood pricing data, an interactive points of interest map with public transport, supermarkets, pharmacies, schools and property listings as well as user opinions of the neighbourhood (although these can be submitted without any verification that the user does indeed live in the neighbourhood being evaluated). Interestingly, although the neighbourhood information is linked to from listings URLs, it is not displayed on them directly as is the case with other portals around the world.

By shelling out for a national promotion campaign (below), Fotocasa will be hoping to capitalise on the fact that its two main rivals in Spain (Idealista and Pisos.com) do not feature strong neighbourhood level data either on their listings or in a separate section of their sites.

Points of interest data fuelling neighbourhood guides is becoming a must-have for portals these days. Some such as Australian challenger homely, have managed to carve out a niche for themselves based on the strength of their neighbourhood features.

Fotocasa has been on a mission to use data to differentiate its offering from market-leading rival idealista for some time. The basis for its new consumer-facing neighbourhood guide would have come from a specialist property investor guide launched in November. In recent months, the Adevinta-owned portal has also bought out specialist data company PixiePixel and has partnered with Trioteca to build a real-time mortgage marketplace.