estatecreate blog

12^th November, 2009 – estatecreate won The innovation Award last night at an awards ceremony organised by The Negotiator magazine in association with The Digital Property Group.

Henry Yates, estatecreate Chief Executive, said: “I am very pleased that the team’s hard work has been recognised by winning another award. The judges were unanimous in voting for estatecreate, which is a great vote of confidence in our product.”

Mark Milner, The Digital Property Group’s (Primelocation.com, FindaProperty.com, Homesandproperty.co.uk and FindaNewHome.com) Chief Executive said: “The success of the Negotiator Awards is a testament to on-going excellence within the market, with firms such as estatecreate gaining much deserved recognition. It’s a pleasure to celebrate their achievements as well as toast the impressive performance of the estate agency industry in challenging times.”

estatecreate is a new tool for estate agents to showcase a vendor’s home with a standalone website for their property with its own domain name – the 21st century glossy property brochure for the web. You can see an example website here: http://dovehousestreetsw3.com/

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The service is very easy to use – estatecreate takes a feed of data from each branch and the agent can then easily add content and publish to a domain name of their choice. You can see a product demo here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIGk-9Bxp4Q

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The judges of the 2009 Awards read like a Who’s Who of Estate Agency. They included:

Peter Bolton King, CEO, National Association of Estate Agents

Paul Broadhead, Head of Policy, Building Societies Association

Nicholas Leeming, Corporate Client Director, Property Finder

Mr Bill McClintock, Chief Operating Officer, The Property Ombudsman Service

Julian O’Dell, Founder, TM Training & Development

Ian Floyed, Chief Executive, My Home Move

Peter Rollings, Managing Director, Marsh & Parsons

Mr Ken Waller, Former Chief Executive of Connells Residential

Lucy Morton, Managing Partner, WA Ellis

John McGrath, Chief Executive Officer, McGrath Estate Agents

James Howard, Associate Director – Development, Urban Splash

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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 www.sub.tv).

estatecreate has announced a new partnership with The Live Organisation, the UK’s leading provider of residential conveyancing, with the launch of Live Sitemaker software which allows agents to create individual websites for their properties.

Tim Price, group sales & marketing director at The Live Organisation said:  “We are constantly looking for ways to give clients the tools to sell properties to customers in the most efficient and user friendly way. Sitemaker provides a contemporary and comprehensive marketing tool which goes well beyond a simple listing.”

“Winning instructions is the life blood of any agent and Sitemaker allows Live agents the opportunity to enhance their portfolio of marketing services, especially for middle and up market properties. And it is exactly this type of sophisticated improvement which can help agents win more business.”

Henry Yates, CEO estatecreate, said “We are excited to be working with The Live Organisation, they have a fantastic client base that will really benefit from using the Live SiteMaker service.”

The Live Sitemaker software allows clients to create an individual website for each property and a personal domain name. The format is easy to read and understand, allowing customers to view the property information with no confusion. Clients have more online space to include information about the local area, schools and contact details, as well as substantial room for photographs.

The easy to use software only takes minutes to create and publish websites. Clients can share the personal property websites through social networks and get more leads from other agents. The personal domain name is more memorable, making it more effective for advertising purposes. The websites can be branded for users, making them more visually appealing. There is no duplicated entries as the software auto-populates the sites for you.

Tim Price added: “Individual property websites are innovative and functional.

We offer estate agents the easiest and most cost effective way to create standalone websites for individual properties. The sites have their own web address and unlimited pages to showcase photos, floorplans, 360 tours and walk throughs.”

More details of Live’s new service can be found at www.live-sitemaker.com.

4th FEBRUARY, 2010 – estatecreate has launched a new service for estate agents that will drive more web traffic to their properties from search engines.

Search Engines such as Google are putting more and more emphasis on website content and domain names. By using estatecreate websites to showcase properties on key street names in an agency’s neighbourhood, agents will increase their search traffic and drive more leads to their properties.

Henry Yates, estatecreate Chief Executive, said “Search engine optimisation (SEO) is one of the most cost-effective marketing tools available to estate agents. By investing in SEO you should see increased traffic and increased business for years to come. Our SEO solution is part of the overall package estate agents buy into when they sign up to estatecreate.”

The service is very easy to set up. First an agent needs to identify key roads where they sell houses in their neighbourhood.

The agent then sets up estatecreate sites for the key addresses around the agent’s branch. These sites will all point back to the estate agent’s website. Whenever the agent has a property for sale on a key road, they showcase it on the appropriate website. You can see an example website here: http://dovehousestreetsw3.com/

estatecreate is a new tool for estate agents to showcase a vendor’s home with a standalone website for their property with its own domain name. The service is very easy to use – estatecreate takes a feed of data from each branch and the agent can then easily add content and publish to a domain name of their choice.

The service is the holder of The Negotiator’s Innovation Award and the Web Marketing Association’s WebAward.

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 www.sub.tv).

The Estate Agent

Originally uploaded by henry_yates

The Estate Agent interviewed estatecreate in their April issue. Unfortunately it is print only, so here is a screenshot.

Image via CrunchBase

After 7 days, 55 followers, following 120 people, 50 updates and more time than I will ever admit to, I just could not take it any longer, so I deleted my account. Twitter.com/HPY is no more.

Last week Twitter dominated my life. If I wasn’t checking Lance Armstrong‘s latest musings from the tour down under (twitter.com/lancearmstrong), or stalking Dragons (which turned out to be fake), I would be constantly interrupting my thought process by checking out the latest conversation being held by some people I am vaguely connected to.

I started the week using www.twitter.com, by Wednesday I had downloaded Power Twitter, a firefox plugin, by Friday I had downloaded Tweetdeck, allowing me to have 3 columns of different groups of mindless consciousness streaming down my page, with a desk top reminder flashing at me just in case I missed a tweet.

Finally the weekend arrived. Respite from this constant pull was in sight. But no. I still had a nagging desire to just have a quick peep to see what was going on. We had some friends over for dinner. Once they had headed home my wife and I stayed up chatting. I confessed about my new relationship with 120 people that I hardly new. I showed her what I had been up to. Relief. Sharing was half the battle. She laughed. “It’s pathetic, what are all these people doing?”. I showed her more, we laughed together this time. I suddenly had an urge to delete my account. The wine definitely helped. Options, Set up, Account, DELETE. Phew. A wave of relief swept over me.

Reading this you may be thinking that the problem here is not Twitter, it is how I was using it. I can not deny that my character is particularly susceptible to be overrun by something like Twitter, but, I could not help but notice that I was not the only one that Twitter had got a grip on. That is why it works so well – it sucks people in, as they feel the need to be part of the constant stream of conversation.

So, did I learn much during my week on Twitter? Did I influence anyone? I don’t think I learnt anything that I would not have picked up elsewhere. I read some blog posts an hour or two before I would have picked them up. However, a few people did read this blog that otherwise would not have done. That is why I signed up – we are launching soon, and we are starting to get our communicating channels in place.

We will use Twitter, but when we do we will need some firm objectives and someone who can handle being plugged in to 100s of people without getting sucked in.

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How much time do you waste clicking on a link to a property only to see that the photos show somewhere completely unsuitable. How would you like to drag a stream of photos of images of properties in the price range and area where you live to quickly zoom in on something you like?

Sorry to get you all excited, but this site does not exist. But it could. I have just been playing with Cooliris. As they put it themselves, “Cooliris transforms your browser into a lightning fast, cinematic way to discover the web”. I was not disappointed. Somone will adapt this for browsing properties – it’s going to be great.

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Image via CrunchBase

I have just tried out Google’s new social bar (you can read their blog post about it here). It allows you to easily integrate Google Friend Connect into your website, so that users can login using either their Google, Yahoo, AIM or OpenID account, comment and have conversations about content on your site.

You can try it out on this site: http://www.ossamples.com/socialmussie/

It looks very easy to implement, so expect to see it on estatecreate.com soon.

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I have been reading about Boxee on Fred Wilson‘s blog but thought it would be focusing solely on the US market. Yesterday I read that it worked with the iPlayer, so I took it for a spin last night.

Boxee is essentially a digital media entertainment hub. It allows you to aggregate all of your digital media from your computer and channels you like on the web in one place. You can then play back through your telly or watch on your computer.

I am a big fan of the iPlayer – I don’t love TV enough to record stuff, but it is great to be able to find something you want to watch when that telly moment comes. Boxee takes this one step further, offering a service which will eventually allow you to watch anything on demand from one place. This feels like the first time that the bridge between the internet and the TV has been built effectively. It will be interesting to see if Boxee ends up being the EPG for the digitally converged living room.

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Image via CrunchBase

This morning three of the top ten posts on techme are predicting more pain for the newspaper industry. The Guardian interviews Clay Shirky here, Slate has a piece on “How newspapers tried to invent the web” and the Atlantic predicts that offline papers, notably the New York Times, will disappear sooner rather than later here.

The industry certainly faces an enormous challenge. In the US and the UK much of this pain has come directly from the sudden drop in advertising revenue from the property sector. In 2009 estate agents will focus their budgets on the web. The issue will be that by the time the economy and the housing market recovers they will have adopted new ways of doing things and I doubt that they will start to redirect more money off line. Newspapers have to radically change. I doubt they will physically disappear, as people enjoy reading a physical paper, but they will have to drastically change the way they operate.

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The other day I was doing my daily trawl of news using my trusty netvibes when I came across one of those Google killer articles. My initial reaction was to ignore it as I do not need a new search engine. However, for some reason I had a quick read.

The article was about Kosmix. Kosmix is in fact not a search engine, it is a “topic guide”. What it does is group together lots of sources of information from Google, Wikipedia, YouTube etc about something you want to know more about. I would say it is more of a Wikipedia killer…

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