2013- The Year of the Mobile
I recently attended The Sunday Times Awards for Estate Agents and I was delighted that Preston Baker won the silver award for Best Small Northern Agency. The event had a number of excellent speakers including Miles Shipside from rightmove.co.uk and Peter Knight from a company called the Property Academy who specialise in helping estate agency businesses train their staff and grow. They both had some fascinating views on the way forward in the property industry. One of the lessons that I took away for the firm was in regards to the rise of mobile technology.
Our website traffic from mobile devices (including tablets) has increased over 500% in the past 12 months compared to a relatively modest 70% growth from desktop machines. At this rate of growth, my desktop site will soon be a footnote compared to the many more customers seeing a smaller version of the site. Over the next few months, I will be looking to replicate our iPhone and Android apps onto a mobile version of the website to make a better browsing experience.
We have found that e-newsletters, with our properties for sale or to let included, have proved very popular for increasing €direct' traffic to our website, but that most of these have been accessed from mobiles which are linked to their email accounts.
Like most organisations we want to promote our message as well as simply our products, and this is the big challenge for the mobile sites. We will be working with this challenge over the next few months to see if there is a balance between promoting our product, the properties, with promoting our message about what makes us unique.
One of the other key themes that came out of the discussions at the Estate Agency Awards, was about €the new normal'. I think this is a very instructive mentality for business people. The key message is that we can't just wait for things to improve in the wider economy or housing market. We must grasp the current opportunity - because it's the only one we have. Another way of looking at the same problem is that you should only worry about what you can influence.
Every major commentator is expecting more of the same in 2013. I will stick my neck out a bit and say that I disagree. Transaction numbers have been roughly half of pre-recession levels for nearly 5 years now. There are a huge number of people who want to move house, or buy their first home. There are real signs that the €funding for lending' scheme is working, with the proportion of first time buyer mortgage approvals increasing. This, coupled with anecdotal evidence from our business of significantly higher interest in moving, means I can confidently predict a significant increase in housing transaction numbers. I am less bothered about price increases, because what our industry thrives on is not over inflated prices, but good numbers of transactions.
Our website traffic from mobile devices (including tablets) has increased over 500% in the past 12 months compared to a relatively modest 70% growth from desktop machines. At this rate of growth, my desktop site will soon be a footnote compared to the many more customers seeing a smaller version of the site. Over the next few months, I will be looking to replicate our iPhone and Android apps onto a mobile version of the website to make a better browsing experience.
We have found that e-newsletters, with our properties for sale or to let included, have proved very popular for increasing €direct' traffic to our website, but that most of these have been accessed from mobiles which are linked to their email accounts.
Like most organisations we want to promote our message as well as simply our products, and this is the big challenge for the mobile sites. We will be working with this challenge over the next few months to see if there is a balance between promoting our product, the properties, with promoting our message about what makes us unique.
One of the other key themes that came out of the discussions at the Estate Agency Awards, was about €the new normal'. I think this is a very instructive mentality for business people. The key message is that we can't just wait for things to improve in the wider economy or housing market. We must grasp the current opportunity - because it's the only one we have. Another way of looking at the same problem is that you should only worry about what you can influence.
Every major commentator is expecting more of the same in 2013. I will stick my neck out a bit and say that I disagree. Transaction numbers have been roughly half of pre-recession levels for nearly 5 years now. There are a huge number of people who want to move house, or buy their first home. There are real signs that the €funding for lending' scheme is working, with the proportion of first time buyer mortgage approvals increasing. This, coupled with anecdotal evidence from our business of significantly higher interest in moving, means I can confidently predict a significant increase in housing transaction numbers. I am less bothered about price increases, because what our industry thrives on is not over inflated prices, but good numbers of transactions.
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