Skilpad.Com Community Blog

Skilpad.Com Property Portal has started developing  info pages on all of South Africa’s towns and cities and suburbs with a view to increasing targeted traffic inquiries to all areas.

And you can help to attract more attention to property listings in your town or suburb on Skilpad.Com by participating in this project. Interested? Then read on to find out how.

At this stage we are writing short, informative articles about various places in South Africa and posting them to well search optimised pages where visitors can also access links to all of the properties for sale or to rent in each area. Shortly visitors to these pages will also be able to access links to real estate agents in each area, as well as to area maps. We will introduce more and more valuable area-specific info over time. All of this useful content will be noticed by search engines, resulting in better property search results for the areas covered by this project.

Clearly it is a big task to develop worthwhile pages about each area, and hence we have started with the main centres, and with places in each area where we have the highest concentrations of property listings. And this is where you come in. If you are passionate about your patch of South Africa and would like to leapfrog your area to the front of the queue, why not send us a short write-up (and a picture or two if possible) and we will put up a page on your area? If you do send us pictures, please confirm upfront that we have permission to publish them on Skipad.Com.

Whether you are an estate agent with property listed on Skilpad.Com, or whether you are somebody who has local knowledge and would simply like to put your area more prominently on our property map, we would love to receive a short article from you. Please email your articles and/or photos to andre@skilpad.com. To give you an idea of what we are looking for, here are a few links to some of the short “place” articles that we have already posted: Victoria West , East London ,  Polokwane , Somerset West and Hartbeespoort. You can find more examples by clicking on the links such as About Gauteng at the bottom of the page on Skilpad.Com Property Portal.

Recently I stopped for coffee at “Die Kraaltjie”, a country shop on the main road close to the Eastern Cape town of Joubertina.

My two passengers and I were tired after a day’s driving and I needed a caffeine boost for the last few hundred kilometres home. We sat down at an outside table and ordered our coffee and snacks from a good-natured old dear. Through the open door of the shop I noticed the “usual” shelves of jams and preserves but I was not about to look at them, having had my fill of tourist traps over the past few days.

But when the coffee and snacks arrived, our interest was piqued by some unexpected items on our plates: namely quails’ eggs and beautiful, deep, green preserved figs. The decent filter coffee worked its magic; the bonsela eggs and figs were delicious and we were charmed by the unassuming generosity of our country hosts.

So you guessed it — I did find myself exploring the shelves inside and I took home jars of figs and eggs for ourselves and friends and family.

Good marketing huh? What lessons could we apply in the real estate market? I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

Skilpad.Com Property Portal wishes South African voters a peaceful election day. Our website statistics this morning show an uncanny lack of activity. I guess everyone is  putting voting ahead of skilpadding this morning — which is how it should be.

Let’s hope for an outcome that will settle anxious markets and contribute towards a recovery in the property industry. Time for cool heads and to celebrate being part of a wonderful democratic country. Julius, chill — bite on a Nando!

Wine that we can relate to!

Yesterday Skilpad.Com Property Portal visited our winelands namesake Skilpadvlei winery near Stellenbosch.

We tasted the winery’s excellent range of wines, including the popular award-winning Sauvignon Blanc and we left with a stash of Skilpad Dop dry red and dry white.

During our visit we had a pleasant chat with Skilpadvlei Marketing Manager J.P Du Toit and agreed that the property skilpad and wine skilpad should support each other with co-operative marketing activities.

For more info about the winery take a look at www.skilpadvlei.co.za

Recently I overheard a businessman from France explaining how it was that when he bought a game farm in South Africa he chose to buy near Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape.

He said that when he became interested in buying a farm in South Africa he sent an email enquiry to a number of estate agents all over South Africa. Only one agent replied and he replied well.

Needless to say, the agent who replied, who happened to be from Port Elizabeth, made the sale. Who knows where he would have bought if the other agents had replied to his original enquiry? And why did the other agents not reply?

There may be a whole lot of reasons why these agents, and many others, sometimes fail to reply to email enquries. It might be that dealing with emails at the end of a pressured day may be the last straw for some. It could be as a result of a whole lot of technical problems. Or maybe some people just feel that replying to emails takes too much time and often is a waste of time. But the moral of this story is very simple: reply promptly and professionally to every email enquiry and you will make extra sales!

I came across an article recently (http://bit.ly/4Hsj6 ) that quoted a study that found that 50% of people who made property enquiries would purchase property in the next 12 months. The article said that most of that group would make their purchase 90 days to 12 months after their initial enquiry. Based on these statistics the article advised estate agents could profitably use a short follow-up email to revive dead leads.

Closer to home, Skilpad.Com Property Portal has recently implemented an automated email enquiry reminder service that contacts real estate agents and property enquirers with a view to ensure that no valuable email enquiries are left unanswered. The response to this intitatvie has been very positive.

So, if you are an estate agent, be sure to attend to that “inbox” and perhaps it is time to sift through those folders where you file old email enquiries.

Sometimes our marketing representatives are asked by estate agents to explain in simple terms how we manage to get all of the properties from their websites onto Skilpad.Com Property Portal as if by magic.

Gloria, one of our marketers, has come up with the best simple answer. “Our little skilpaadjie crawls around your site and brings your listings across to ours”.

And our skilpaadjie crawls so quickly nogal!

There has been a shift in mindset in the real estate industry since mid 2008 when we launched Skilpad.Com: Property Portal: at least that is our perception.

When we started introducing our portal, relatively few estate agents embraced our view that it was high time for the Internet to overtake print as the primary medium for advertising property listings in South Africa.

Today, we are taken far more seriously when we present our case. Many of the agents we speak to ask informed questions and we are being  approached by agents who are actively researching online options. More and more Internet savvy real estate agents are also discovering the benefits of participating in social media networking.

…the shift from print to Internet is now entrenched and irreversible

So what has changed? Certainly the current tough market conditions have forced agents to seek opportunities to reduce their running costs. And it is not difficult for them to see that Internet advertising costs a small fraction of what they pay for print advertisements. This raises questions like: What if we moved most of our advertising to the Internet? What if we beefed up our own websites and listed on the best property portals? How would the buyers react?

At the same time there are changes afoot that will improve broadband access and affordability. Wireless broadband, including 3G/HSDPA mobile data services now rival available fixed-line ADSL offerings in terms of both speed and price. Telkom has launched a WiMAX service and others are following, including the second national operator Neotel. The arrival of new international submarine fibre optic cables later this year will bring down the cost of international bandwidth dramatically. The rapid growth in the availability and performance of internet capable mobile phones is also providing the South African public with more reasons to makes us of purpose-designed facilities like http://mobile.skilpad.com for mobile property searching.  Another interesting statistic noted by Nielsen Online researchers is that the age group that saw the highest growth in Internet usage in South Africa in 2008 was the over-50s.

Taking all of the key factors together, viz. vastly cheaper advertising for estate agents, improved and more affordable connectivity, and much more convenient and more efficient property searching on the Internet, I believe that the shift from print to Internet is now entrenched and irreversible.

It may take a while before 87% of property purchased is first found on the Internet, and 92% of estate agents contracted are found on the Internet, as is the case in the United States. But it is definitely moving that way!

Skilpad.Com has launched a South Africa Property Video Competition to promote the use of its innovative new video tools which allow estate agents to add video clips to their property listings.

Estate agents can win prizes by entering video clips into the competition. The judges are looking for entries that make the most effective use of video to market their properties. All entries are profiled in a competition video gallery that can be viewed by all visitors to the site. Visitors can comment on the video clips and there are also prizes for the best comments. Entries close on Saturday 11th April and the winners will be announced on Monday 13th April.

Following the long awaited arrival of Google South Africa Maps with adequate street information, Skilpad.Com now uses this service to power its dynamic maps.

One of the reasons for this change is to take advantage of the satellite and hybrid (combination of map and satellite) views that Google offers.

When anybody searches for property on Skilpad.Com, a region, suburb or street map is generated, corresponding to the search parameters. The maps are zoomable and scrollable. More map functionality will be added soon.

Let us know what you think of the new-look maps.

Fine&Country this week became the first national real estate group in South Africa to list property from all of its offices on the Skilpad.Com, South Africa’s fastest growing property portal.

The group of independent property agencies (see www.fineandcountry.co.za ) specialises in quality South African property and forms part of the international Fine&Country Group with its headquarters in London

While Fine&Country is the first national group to list en-masse on Skilpad-Com, a growing number of offices of other leading estate agency groups and independent agencies are represented on the portal. At the time of writing, there are more than 45 000 properties for sale or to rent on Skilpad.Com and the number is growing daily.