The most popular property portals

Online portals with property listings are still one of the most effective ways to sell your house, flat or plot faster. The reason is simple – most people begin their search for a home via the Internet. That is why today we will take a closer look at the most popular portals in our industry and check how to use them.

The biggest portals

Although there are probably many more, only a handful of them have broken through into general awareness:

• otodom.pl
• dom.gratka.pl
• domiporta.pl
• nieruchomosci-online.pl
• szybko.pl
• Why these in particular? How many users do they have? What do they offer?

otodom.pl

A portal belonging to the Allegro group, which has been on the market for 8 years. It is very popular – it holds as much as 6.37% of the market, which in practice means almost 1.4 million users a month (of which 166,490 users come from the Silesian Voivodeship). In itself, therefore, it is a huge market with plenty to play for.

dom.gratka.pl

It belongs to the Polskapresse group and has been on the market for as long as 12 years. It has taken 4.21% of the pie, which means over 912 thousand unique users (of which 148,342 are from the Silesian Voivodeship). So there is plenty to fight for.

domiporta.pl

A portal belonging to the Agora group, with a history going back 8 years and currently holding 2.43% of the online property market. This means over 0.5 million users.

nieruchomosci-online.pl

Ranking just below domiporta.pl is the nieruchomosci-online.pl portal – which belongs to the company NNV, publisher of the e-magazine ESTATE, aimed at estate agents. It has been on the market for 7 years and has managed to take a little over 2% of potential clients. This translates into almost 450 thousand users.

szybko.pl

Closing the list of the most popular portals is szybko.pl, which has been on the market for 8 years and in that time has won the hearts of over 200 thousand users – that is, less than one percent of the market.

The power of concentration

The first two, most popular portals particularly deserve our attention. Not only because the number of their users is so great – but also because they offer interesting and useful mechanisms for internal promotion of listings – which everyone who wants to sell their property quickly should know about.

The otodom.pl portal of the Allegro group...

...offers a whole range of promotional options. The first and most popular are the so-called listing bumps – whereby our property listing immediately appears at the top of the list of search results. At least until the competition does the same. It is vigilance and speed of reaction that count with bumps.

A bump costs PLN 3, but if you buy a package, the price of a single bump falls significantly. That alone is a reason why it pays to use the services of an estate agent – there is a much greater chance that they will already have bought a package, which is hardly worth buying for an individual client. We agents use this tool often – and so we also benefit from discounts.

And bumps are highly effective. Statistics show that the number of views of a listing is multiplied by 9 (!), and the number of clicks on the phone number increases 11-fold!

There is, however, a way to make the number of clicks on the phone number on this portal grow as much as 22-fold. What is that way?

You have to pay PLN 15, and our listing will appear at the top of the search results list (unless someone buys this service after us). As the statistics show – this operation pays off. The number of views is 11 times greater than for a non-promoted listing.

Another option this portal gives us is placing a link to the listing displayed next to the list of property search results for a given area. We pay only PLN 5 a week for this, but the effect is stunning. By matching the listing to the area, we can increase clicks on the phone number up to... 40 times!

The portal also offers several other options: the so-called showcase – that is, having the listing displayed in rotation on the home page – or adding the advertisement to OLX.pl (formerly Tablica.pl) as well. When we add the fact that the portal also has a responsive website and a mobile app – it turns out that otodom.pl puts into our hands a really large set of interesting tools, from which a skilled estate agent can build – as if from building blocks – an effective promotional strategy.

The dom.gratka.pl portal, in turn...

...works on slightly different principles. It offers the possibility of buying special points – which are a kind of internal currency of the portal.

Points can be used to buy various services. What do we have to choose from?

We can allocate points to a given listing. The more points a listing has, the higher it appears on the list of listings – which of course translates into the number of views and enquiries.

What exactly are the effects? Statistics show that listings promoted with points can be displayed up to… 77 times more often than non-promoted ones. We receive up to 3 times more phone calls, and we have... 45 times more enquiries! So it is a cost-effective form of promoting a property listing.

On the portal we can also highlight a property listing on the map. We pay for this upfront with points and the highlight lasts 7 days. The effects are similar to those of promoting a listing in the search results.

An interesting option is the possibility of promoting a listing by means of the so-called Atopowiadamiacz (an alert service). For PLN 34.50 net, the portal will send 1,000 notifications about our listing to people who are potentially interested in this type of property (who have previously given their consent and confirmed what exactly interests them in a given area). The solution is brilliant in its simplicity.

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Of course, the topic of promoting a property listing on portals is much broader and deeper than I can describe here on the blog. Some agents, after years of practice, achieve true virtuosity in choosing the right tools offered by this type of portal. This is another reason why it is worth considering hiring a professional estate agent who will take care of selling our property quickly and effectively.

If you have any questions or problems – I encourage you to contact me.

And here is my question for you: do you use property portals too? What problems have you encountered there? Share your opinion in a comment.