Property portals: Global Top 100

Editor's note: This item is republished with permission from Global Edge Marketing Ltd. The original post can be viewed here.

All of the property-search portals in the top 20 share one of two characteristics: They are either outright market leaders or they are the main challengers in large established markets, most notably in the U.S.

Realtor.com (U.S.), Soufun.com (China), Rightmove.co.uk (U.K.), Funda.nl (Netherlands), Immobilienscout24.de (Germany), Seloger.com (France), realestate.com.au (Australia) all dominate their respective markets. Arguably, Immobilmente.com is the market leader in Italy.

Market leaders "own" their categories and are referenced naturally on the Web, which goes someway to explain their dominance. They have also been around longer and acquired links in the days when Web masters responded to link request e-mails.

I'd be willing to bet that in five years' time, there will be very few new entrants into the top 20 from portals in established markets. Dislodging market leaders is extremely difficult. It's often more efficient to set fire to a large pile of cash! The new entrants are more likely to come from China, Russia, India and perhaps South America -- large, immature markets with low Internet penetration and plenty of room for future growth.

Ranking the portals

We opted to rank the sites by the number of unique inbound links rather than the more sophisticated measure of MozRank. This is because the MozRank scores of the top portals were so similar that in many cases we were concerned how significant the results would be by using this as the main criteria. We have included both measures in the table.

Seattle-based search marketing portal SEOMoz caused controversy in November last year with the launch of a LinkScape, a tool that crawls 34 billion URLs. Your own Web site is probably in its index and is currently being used to calculate the popularity of your own site and sites that you link to.

LinkScape attempts to replicate the most important elements of Google's algorithm and then provides quantitative scores that allow you to benchmark your own site against those of your competitors. It's an ambitious project and the results are not perfect, but it's the best tool available on the Net, far better than using Yahoo Site Explorer, the next-best alternative.

Using LinkScape to rank the world's property portals

Although Global Edge has good coverage of English-language overseas portals, we often get asked by agents for recommendations on which portals they should use to target non-English-speaking markets. It's a question we've found difficult to answer, especially as we have never been able to find a definitive list of global property portals. This article is our attempt to build a list of the world's "most important" portals. Hopefully you can use it as a starting point for researching marketing opportunities in a variety of overseas markets.

Methodology

Our first step was to ask our multilingual team to compile a long list of more than 200 property portals from across the globe. The list is inevitably biased towards the language skills of the team. We have native English, French, German, Spanish and Russian speakers. Our Chinese and Japanese left a lot to be desired, but we did try!

Secondly, we excluded large classified sites like Oodle and Yahoo to ensure we were comparing like with like. Finally, we ran each portal through the SEOmoz LinkScape Tool to see which portals were the best referenced on the Internet. To do this we looked at two metrics:

• Number of unique inbound links at each portal. To use a public relations analogy, this is equivalent to measuring the number of newspapers the portal has ever been mentioned in.
• MozRank domain score, which evaluates not only the number of links but the importance of those links. To continue the analogy, this is equivalent to weighting mentions in the New York Times higher than mentions in a small local newspaper.

Anomalies

The biggest problem with the methodology is that each link is counted equally. Companies with lots of low-quality links could theoretically appear much higher in the rankings and therefore appear stronger than they actually are on the search engines. This appears to be the case with immobilmente.com which is listed fourth in the table. Its MozRank score is much lower than the surrounding portals, suggesting it is not as powerful as the rankings suggest.

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