IOLProperty welcomes our 1,000,000th visitor to the site
A little over a year ago, South Africa's largest property website, www.iolproperty.co.za, was launched and quickly became the fastest growing real estate site in the country. Last month we welcomed our 1,000,000th visitor in what has been a whirlwind year for IOLProperty.
"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 very 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 too! So we have stuck to a simple plan - to give the potential buyer exactly what he needs to find his ideal property."
"For me this was easy to work out, I had been looking for sometime to buy a house myself, and had become more and more frustrated with monitoring up to ten 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!"
So what does the buyer want?
Most importantly 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 now all available here in a single search."
The second part of the plan was to make it as easy and quick as possible for visitors to find the listings of interest.
"Consequently, we have worked out a variety of search options to suit the different needs of our visitors. This includes everything from the quick "smart search" (which uniquely can also predict which other suburbs are of most interest to the home buyer in addition to the one the user has selected) to the recently launched "horizontal" search facility targeted not geographically, but at specific buyer interests e.g. new listings, price changes, affordable housing, guesthouses and farms, commercial property etc.
"And the innovation won't stop here. With a fantastic first year behind us, all our core systems and processes now in place, we have plans for a great second year of growth and further development. "
Posted at 11:13AM Feb 26, 2010 by Editor in Market |