A little over a year ago www.iolproperty.co.za was launched and last month the site welcomed its millionth visitor.
“This is very gratifying, because when we launched in January 2009, we were really not sure what the response would be. The market then was dominated by two large players and even though we had the backing of Independent Newspapers, marketing spend is not a guarantee of success in this space,” says GM Grant Leigh.
The site logged 50 000 users in its first month and has grown quickly and consistently since. Last month 170 000 people visited the site.
“Marketing spend got us a good chunk of that initial 50 000, but beyond that, the philosophy for success in webworld is brutally simple and very measurable: if your visitors don’t like your site, they won’t return. However if they do, they will and hopefully bring a few of their friends with them. So we have stuck to a simple plan – to give potential buyers exactly what they need to find their ideal properties.
“I had been looking for a house myself for sometime, and had become more and more frustrated with monitoring up to 10 different websites every day, to find some of them down or the search facilities cumbersome and slow. It became almost a full time job just looking for somewhere to live,” says Leigh.
So what do buyers want? Most important is having the widest selection of properties available in one place. IOLProperty’s listings include the online listings from about 10 000 estate agents around the country, classified property ads from the newspapers and listings from major property print publications such as the Star Property Guide, the Sunday Tribune Property Guide and the Property Trader family of magazines.
“So a visit to IOLProperty means property buyers don’t have to jump from website to website or across different media – it’s all available in a single search.”
The second part of the plan was to make it as quick and easy as possible for visitors to find the listings they are interested in. There are a variety of search options to suit the different needs of visitors to the site. These include quick “smart searches” (which can also predict which other suburbs are of most interest to buyers in addition to the ones they select), and the recently launched “horizontal” search facility which allows buyers to search by specific interests such as new listings, price changes, affordable housing, guesthouses and farms, commercial property and so on.
And, says Leigh, the innovation won’t stop here.
“With a wonderful first year behind us, all the core systems and processes are now in place, and we have plans for a great second year of growth and further development.
