5 of The Best (and Worst) Portal Market Reports From Around The World: October

A couple of weeks ago we started to look through the many many housing market reports and articles produced by property portals, which it seems, are the new real estate data companies.

The average return on investment of buy to rent properties in Vancouver or the average time on the market of 2 bedroom apartments in Lagos might not be of interest to us, but the way in which these reports are conceived, presented, and used as marketing collateral by property sites is increasingly so.

There have been so many reports blowing up our feeds that we decided to bring you the best of portal housing reports every month. Here are some of the more notable ones from October...

The UK

OpenBrix: As one of a handful of British challenger portals, OpenBrix (whose CEO Adam Piggott we interviewed in July) has to find an angle for producing housing market research that will get covered which others might not have looked at. OpenBrix’s look at the relationship between street names and house prices got some decent pick-up.

Takeaways: Road names with the word “Saint” are the most popular among UK home buyers. Roads with the word “Whistler” have the most expensive housing.

Notable for: Where some might see a man getting distracted from work and having an idle look through land registry data after a question pops into his head, we see a genuine niche piece of research that the big-boy portals haven’t already covered and something that has potential to go at least semi-viral.

The UAE

Bayut and Dubizzle: Since EMPG’s deal with Dubbizle’s ex-owner OLX Group these two have been set to dominate in the Emirates. The two are now sharing data and collaborating on housing reports it seems and producing some slick content.

Takeaways: Prices in Dubai have remained competitive throughout the quarter. Neighbourhood level insights got extensive coverage in the local media.

Notable for: Last time we extolled the virtues of the humble infographic to accompany portal housing reports as they let users see everything without having to read long paragraphs replete with stats. Bayut and Dubizzle have gone one step further here and created an infographic video to show even more information at a glance for further dissemination on social media.

Germany

ImmobilienScout24: It’s immediately obvious on seeing the German portal’s reports that they put a lot of resources into presentation, and even if the takeaways are somewhat generic and obvious, they are targeted at the general public rather than real estate geeks like us here at OnlineMarketplaces.

Takeaways: All of the properties in Germany cost €56,386,198,61. That is, if you had bought all the houses, apartments and land offered on ImmoScout24 this month, you would have had to pay more than 56 billion for them.

Notable for: We praised the German market leader last time for some expertly presented data, and this time we spotted a feature we think is really neat: a code snippet for webmasters to paste into their source code and display the branded map animation on their site. We won't hold it against them that I spent 15 frustrating minutes trying to insert the code snippet here below without seeing it render in the preview of this article.

France

SeLoger: Okay, so here we have to admit that the report in question is not exactly the most interesting one we’ve seen, but that’s not the point here. The Axel Springer owned portal makes this list because it was referred to in a nice little piece of journalism we read this week on ‘ghost-villages’

Takeaways: 1 in 4 Ile-de-France residents want to buy in the provinces.

Notable for: 'If you publish it they will come'. Although SeLoger didn’t get that all important ‘follow link’ from the journalist this time, they got their name out there in a piece of investigative journalism. This is easier said than done for some smaller portals, but larger nationally-important portals are bound to get these sort of mentions if they just keep building up a volume of reports and data.

USA

Realtor.com: A lot of the housing reports produced by property portals are dry. The ideas behind them come from data people and the writing that accompanies them is written by a third party. With Halloween approaching Realtor.com commissioned a survey about whether potential buyers would be put off by haunted houses and if their current house is haunted.

Takeaways: There are a few interesting tidbits here, perhaps the most interesting being that 56% of Americans who believe their home is haunted have not considered moving. I disagree with them. I'd be straight out of there.

Notable for: Firstly this report gave me an easy piece of content to put in the “...and finally” section of my Friday roundup email. Secondly, it turns out that Realtor.com has covered the subject of haunted houses before around this time of year. It’s obviously a formula that gets good pick up on social media and elsewhere.