estatecreate blog

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estatecreate has been shortlisted for The Estate Agency Innovation Award category of The Negotiator Awards 2009, organised in association with The Digital Property Group, FindaProperty.com and Primelocation.com.

Clare Bettelley, The editor of The Negotiator, the leading magazine for the world of estate agency, said: “We’ve had a terrific response and estatecreate has done brilliantly to get shortlisted from such a huge field. Britain’s estate agents are certainly having a tough time at the moment, but this is an industry awash with talent, entrepreneurialism and creativity, so we’re delighted we’re able to organise a ceremony to reward those firms that are delivering industry best practice”.

Henry Yates, estatecreate Chief Executive, said: “we are excited about being shortlisted for The Estate Agency Innovation Award. We have had a great response from estate agents across the UK and it is very satisfying to be recognised by The Negotiator for the work we have done within the industry.”

estatecreate was founded by Henry Yates and is the first company to offer this service to estate agents in the UK. Yates is an experienced entrepreneur who has previously co-founded and sold two businesses, Face, the research and planning agency (www.facegroup.co.uk, sold to Cello PLC) and Univillage.com, the social network for students (sold to Sub.tv).

3rd August, 2009 – Today estate agents using GMG Property Services (GMGPS) software, including Vebra, Core Systems and CFP, will easily be able to create individual property websites for any of their properties.
estatecreate has implemented a feed so that clients using GMGPS software can import all of their properties to estatecreate and then simply click to publish a property to its own website with a personal domain name e.g. www.dovehousestreet.com.
As part of the partnership estatecreate is offering estate agents a 1 month free trial and will not be charging a set up fee (usually £10/month).

Henry Yates, estatecreate Chief Executive, said: “we are excited to be working with GMG Property Services. They are the market leader with over 35% of agents using their software. This partnership delivers great value to the estate agency market.”

Henry added “offering potential clients their own website for their property is a great way of wining instructions. estatecreate single property sites are the 21st Century’s answer to property brochures.”

Mark Goddard, Group Managing Director, GMG Property Services, said “estatecreate is an ideal partner for us as it enables us to offer our customers a great tool to win new instructions. In the US just under 30% of all properties have their own website, we anticipate that this will become more popular in the UK.”

estatecreate is designed for people without any technical skills. Once an agent has been set up with their own template and a feed to automatically upload properties, the agent can easily move text, photos and video, add pages and drag and drop content around each page. To see a video demonstration of the product click the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIGk-9Bxp4Q.
estatecreate was founded by Henry Yates and is the first company to offer this service to estate agents in the UK. Yates is an experienced entrepreneur who has previously co- founded and sold two businesses, Face, the research and planning agency (www.facegroup.co.uk, sold to Cello PLC) and Univillage.com, the social network for students (sold to Sub.tv).

GMG Property Services is made up of Vebra, Core Systems, CFP Software and The Media Design House. It is wholly owned by Guardian Media Group, one of the UK’s leading multimedia companies.

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Web User magazine has selected estatecreate.com as one of their best new websites. I can not provide a link to the article as it is not yet on the web(?!). But this is what it says:

“estatecreate.com could be useful to anyone wanting to sell or rent out property without involving an estate agent. It lets you create a dedicated website for your house or holiday home, with photos, videos, maps and contact details. This can then be promoted on property sites, social networks and other online channels. estatecreate.com is easy to use and lets you build a decent site in minutes. A basic account with web hosting, unlimited storage and listing on partner sites costs from £5.95 per month, but you can create an ad-supported site for free.”

I could not have said it better myself.

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• EstateCreate.com – A Website For Your Property (killerstartups.com)

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Great post here by Paul Graham on why people will predominantly watch TV over the internet. Here’s an exerpt:

“About twenty years ago people noticed computers and TV were on a collision course and started to speculate about what they’d produce when they converged. We now know the answer: computers…

The somewhat more surprising force was one specific type of innovation: social applications. The average teenage kid has a pretty much infinite capacity for talking to their friends. But they can’t physically be with them all the time. When I was in high school the solution was the telephone. Now it’s social networks, multiplayer games, and various messaging applications. The way you reach them all is through a computer. Which means every teenage kid (a) wants a computer with an Internet connection, (b) has an incentive to figure out how to use it, and (c) spends countless hours in front of it…

After decades of running an IV drip right into their audience, people in the entertainment business had understandably come to think of them as rather passive. They thought they’d be able to dictate the way shows reached audiences. But they underestimated the force of their desire to connect with one another.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal described how TV networks were trying to add more live shows, partly as a way to make viewers watch TV synchronously instead of watching recorded shows when it suited them. Instead of delivering what viewers want, they’re trying to force them to change their habits to suit the networks’ obsolete business model. That never works unless you have a monopoly or cartel to enforce it, and even then it only works temporarily.”

Looks like the Murdoch clan have a lot of work to do reworking their business models for newspapers and TV.

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Mass emailing everyone you know is not something you should do often, if at all. Seth Godin, marketer extraordinaire, advises against it at all times – he has a great post on it here. Occasionally you get a mass email from someone you vaguely know and they put all of the email addresses in the “to” box so that you can see everyone else they have emailed. I usually “tut” to myself and think what a dumbarse. Well today, I broke both rules. What a dumbarse. If anyone who received that email reads this, I apologise!

Thanks to Marc Davison over at 1000Watt.

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Great clip from the Today programme this morning comparing two very different reactions to “stressful” situations. The pilot of the airbus, which landed safely in New York’s Hudson River compared with Christian Bale‘s outburst on a film set. You can listen to it here (Bale’s rant has been sensored – you can hear the full outburst here. Poor thing, he must have been very stressed out).

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It should relieve the pain…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbIGbZ6gq_Y

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I have just been catching up on Fred Wilson‘s blog and was interested to see his post on Joe The Plumber’s Landing Page. The post basically says that Google should improve its Google Local service to provider better landing pages for small businesses (skinning, own URL, call to action etc). Several Union Square Ventures‘ portfolio companies are in the business of helping advertisers target local businesses – so I can see why he would like Google to help solve their landing page problem as this would bring more of them in to the market for being sold online advertising.

Google Local is already a very powerful resource – I can see that if Google does improve its service, this could put traditional directories such as Yellow Pages and Thompson Local under even more pressure. These companies have been slow to innovate, it may now be too late to grab their slice of the online pie.

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Today we ventured out of our lair for the first time to give the first ever demonstration of estatecreate.com. The venue was a packed OpenCoffee session on 5th Floor of Waterstones, Piccadilly. The Seedcamp team were out in force, including Saul Klein and Reshma Sohoni, as this year’s application process is now open.

We set up our makeshift signage and then spent the next two hours demoing our product to other entrepreneurs and investors.

We received some great feedback and even a few customers. The general consensus was that they liked the free website builder for property and thought the product had legs. There were some great usability comments (particularly from the experts at Clearleft) thank you for those, we are now working on some improvements.

We are aiming to have our private beta out in a week or so. If you would like to be one of the first people to use the site register your email address here: estatecreate.com.