A property search engine launched in January this year Proptyle says its tech and services provide significant savings to estate agents balking at the cost of advertising fees on leading portals like Rightmove and Zoopla.
Founders Yash and Tej Patel say they launched the company with the specific aim of helping agents dramatically cut their expenses so that they can reallocate these cost savings towards vendors and landlords.
Specialising in banking and telecommunications, the Patel brothers say their “next generation” hybrid vertical search platform works like Google, Nestoria or Mitula but displays as a portal.
Because the listings are just links to agents’ websites, inventory displayed on Proptyle is always in sync with the market reality, eliminating ghost or stale properties.
The brothers claim agents currently spend an average of around £948 per month, per branch for listing and marketing on portals.
With Proptyle, however agents can list their properties for free while gaining access to direct traffic to their websites and profiting from direct lead generation.
The search engine also claims to provide “accurate, real time information about residential and commercial property across more postcodes than the two leading property portals.”
“The time and effort it takes to manage property listings on portals is eliminated with Proptyle as we sync and update all property details on your behalf,” the company says.
In addition administrative staff costs are cut as listings are uploaded automatically and leads are sent directly to a user’s website. Information about the source of online traffic is also automatically recorded and emailed to them on a regular basis.
In terms of fees Proptyle offers a user-pays system for the elements of the service that apply to a customer’s business.
“For example, if you choose to feature a property on an ad hoc basis this will only cost you a small one off fee of £30 per listing,” the company says.
According to Estate Agent Today (EAT) a ‘statistics’ service of £30 per month per registration also exists which includes sending emails to agents on a periodic basis about click statistics and daily property inventory refresh emails.
It offers the ability for agents to set up featured properties at an additional £30 per week per featured property.
Proptyle claims the quality of users’ online traffic will be so improved an agent’s staff will only be spending their time talking to the most relevant clients.
Yash Patel is quoted on EAT as saying “My brother and I spotted a gap in the market for a cost effective property search tool that offers unbiased, comprehensive and real time coverage of the market as a whole.
“The problem with the current market leaders in this space is not only the substantial cost for using their services (which agents are finding increasingly unpalatable) but also the fact that they do not offer the flexible service that agents crave.
“We believe proptyle presents a real solution to many current market challenges and are confident in the extensive capabilities of our unique offering,” Patel says in the report.
The Patel brothers also argue Proptyle will be better able to support features like interactive property tours, interactive chats with agents and virtual tours they claim aren’t possible through Rightmove.
“It would be very hard to cover all video formats via Rightmove feeds for example and the feed size would grow dramatically,” PropertyIndustryEye quotes the founders as saying in February.
“Proptyle already does all this via direct lead generation approach. With proptyle the consumer directly connects with the property’s agent.”
