OnTheMarket Signs Deal With Data Specialist Sprift

British majority agent-owned property portal OnTheMarket has today announced a partnership with property data specialist Sprift. Under the new partnership, the portal's agent customers will get free access to Sprift's online appraisal guides via OnTheMarket's back-end tools section OTM Expert.

Designed to help its agent customers win more sales and lettings mandates, the deal will see agents get access to a service that normally costs £125 per month and which includes information on property features such as plot size, internet coverage and speed, school evaluations collected from sources such as Google, Royal Mail and Ordnance Survey. All OnTheMarket customers are expected to have access to the feature within the next six weeks.

Having alluded to an upcoming offer of greater access to data for customers in a recent interview, OnTheMarket CEO Jason Tebb said of his company's latest partnership:

"Our agents have told me what they need and want from a portal, and what services and functionality would make a difference to them. I’ve said that I will facilitate change to benefit agents and consumers; this partnership is the start of that, but there is more to come and I look forward to sharing further news in the very near future.”

“Providing enhanced data and market intelligence for agents was one of our key priorities for the first few months of 2021 and I’m very pleased that we’ve been able to secure this partnership agreement with Sprift and are implementing this functionality so quickly, meaning that we can support our agents in winning new instructions and give them an tangible advantage on valuations.  I believe providing our customers with high quality, free and easily generated market appraisal guides powered by Sprift is core to our promise to support our estate agent customers  and demonstrates our commitment to forming commercial partnerships with ‘best in class’ providers that benefit both our agents and consumers.”

Property portals in the UK are now scrambling to get access to more housing data both to offer to their customers and to position themselves as the source of information for users. What platforms such as Homesearch and Twindig started in building files on all homes in the UK market, the likes of Zoopla and OnTheMarket and even challengers like Propertyheads and OneDome are now looking at and building data pools to emulate the idea of a 'log book' for all properties in the country.

Indeed it seems that data companies (or partnerships with them) are the 'must-have'  that no self-respecting property portal can now be without. Square Yards in India recently bought up data company PropsAMC, in Southeast Asia PropertyGuru bought MyPropertyData and in the US although CoStar may have been thwarted in its attempts to buy CoreLogic, its $250m purchase of Homesnap still came with a lot of data for the company to add to its pool.