This week saw the launch of a new property portal which claims it will be one of the UK’s top portals within months - despite being completely free for estate agents and property buyers and sellers.
Houser.co.uk has already signed up more than 5,300 UK estate agents and promises to make considerable changes to the way consumers search for property, due to “new technology” on offer.
The site will be populated at launch with data already obtained from agents’ websites and claims it will have an “instant indent” on search engine results.
Advantages to property buyers include not only the centralisation of listings from a range of other portals and private sellers, but also a simple and automated ‘viewing scheduler’ service.
Houser is the brainchild of Canadian entrepreneur Rocky Mirza. He claims that within a short time “Houser will easily outstrip Rightmove and Zoopla because agents and consumers will see its effectiveness.”
Houser works like this: Individual agents’ branches who have signed up to Houser upload their stock to their own websites and, automatically, the inventory appears on the new portal as well. So far, Mirza says some 5,150 agents have signed up with a free-for-five-years promise.
At the same time internet ‘crawlers’ will be scouring the web and social media for details and images of other properties for sale and to let, including those from agents who have not signed up, and including those being sold privately via internet ‘small ads’ and via social media.
All of these properties will then be added to Houser and will be visible to the public, with agents' or sellers' details added.
“Within a short time it will easily outstrip Rightmove and Zoopla because agents will see its effectiveness and know it is free to use,” said Mirza.
Mirza believes Houser will eventually become the ‘go to’ site for would-be buyers because it would ultimately list all of those from agents and those for sale privately - so long as the seller puts the details somewhere on the web so they can be discovered - ‘crawled’ - by the new portal.
The properties of agents who have signed up will have more prominence than those whose properties are ‘crawled’ and Mirza says agents who wish to pay can obtain even greater prominence or can use the property listing to promote additional services.
But he insists the unique selling point of his portal will be the free basic listings for every agent.
The site currently has a holding home page in place and will be fully operational from next week, beginning January 12.
Mirza is keeping tight-lipped about how he will make the site financially viable given that he says “charging agents to list their properties is a broken business model.” But he also says the site will ultimately be so comprehensive it will attract advertising from industry and allied service providers.
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