News that Zoopla is to expel aggregators that merely list private rental and sale properties and are not “full service” agents is slowly reaching the ears of the public.
If you read the two blogs below, by the London Evening Standard’s accidental landlord columnist Victoria Whitlock, you will see what we mean.
Do read the blogs in order.
The first one sets out how landlords can let their own properties and get them listed on Rightmove and Zoopla “for just a few quid” by using an online agent.
She lists some of the online agents, their fees and services. Interestingly, she criticises Rentify for writing “the ad for you”. One of Zoopla’s criteria is that agents, not landlords or vendors, write the property details.
In the second blog, written after getting wind of Zoopla’s plans, she says that online agents save landlords a fortune and their presence on property portals “annoys the hell out of traditional bricks and mortar agents, Rightmove and Zoopla’s biggest customers. I don’t need to tell you why.
“As a result, several of the larger estate agents and letting agents have grouped together to create a new group, called Agents Mutual, which is planning to launch a new property website at the end of next year.”
Her conclusions? Well, Rightmove and Zoopla are apparently “a bit jittery” about this, but Whitlock seems to think that most of the online services currently saving landlords a fortune will still be around.
“There’s still a lot of life left in the DIY landlord,” she says.
We wonder what Rightmove and Zoopla make of it – let alone Agents’ Mutual, which certainly does not intend to let aggregators on to its site but probably does not think that is its major motivation for launching.
http://www.victoriawhitlock.co.uk/find-a-tenant-for-29/
http://victoriawhitlock.co.uk/victoria-whitlock-s-blog/
Comments
Thank you for running my blogs, but just to clarify, my beef with Rentify is not that the agent writes the ad but that it automates the process, so some of the ads are a little odd. For example, my rather ordinary one-bed flat was described as 'astonishing'. Otherwise I have no problem with online agents writing the property descriptions if this is required by Zoopla.