Skilpad.Com Community Blog

Skilpad.Com Property Portal has developed three  great-value opportunities for South African estate agencies to own their own great value real estate websites.

The website packages complement the portal’s standing offer to South African estate agencies to list their properties for free on Skilpad.Com. Aimed primarily at small estate agencies that do not yet have their own personal website presence, the packages provide agents with the opportunity to list an unlimited number of properties on a tried-and-tested website platform with their own branding and own domain name (.co.za or .com).

While these low-cost packages provide an ideal entry point for small agencies to own their own patch of cyberspace, they are robust and reliable enough to provide a website presence for any agency. And one of the spinoffs for agencies that use these websites is that they benefit from the ongoing addition of free new features arising from the ongoing development of Skilpad.Com itself.

More information on the Skilpad.Com real estate website options is available at: http://www.skilpad.com/websites.php?menu=agents

Skilpad.Com Property Portal has develolped an innovative regional wiki that allows visitors to contribute directly to the development of the portal by posting information about any cities, towns or suburbs in South Africa.

The idea of the wiki is to create a fun way for website visitors to participate in the portal’s goal of providing useful information about all the different areas of South Africa.

It is easy to participate. Simply click on one of the regional links at the bottom of  www.skilpad.com , e.g. About Eastern Cape , and then click on a town link, e.g. About Port Elizabeth. Then click on the “Know Port Elizabeth?” link indicated by our new website character “Torty” the tortoise, and follow the simple instructions. You can use the wiki to add useful information or photographs.

After approval by Skilpad.Com, the content you add will appear on the appropriate regional page, together with links to a map of the area, properties for sale or to rent in the area, and estate agencies in the area. If you would like to add content about a particular town or suburb which is not yet activated on the wiki, please email an activation request to andre@skilpad.com .

We look forward to your participation!

Skilpad.Com’s Andre Viljoen was interviewed in the first of a three-part series on Nelson Mandela Bay’s vibrant family lifestyle radio station Kingfisher FM. Today’s interview dealt with the origins of South Africa’s Skilpad.Com property portal, which is growing at an impressive rate.

The next interview will be at 11.20am on Wednesday 17th June and the last will be at the same time on Wednesday 24th June. The forthcoming interviews will focus on new features and technology in the pipeline at Skilpad.Com as well as trends in the property industry. If you live in Port Elizabeth or the surrounding area, you can listen to these programmes on the new transmitter frequency of 107.5 or on 103.8. Alternatively, if  you are elsewhere, you can listen on the great new streaming radio service at http://www.axxess.co.za/kingfisherplayer/player.html

In a good news development for the South African real estate industry,  Skilpad.Com Property Portal has announced that South African estate agencies may list their properties for free on the portal on an ongoing basis.

Skilpad.Com is the fastest-growing property portal in South Africa, with some 80 000 property listings at the time of writing, and is a leader in innovative property advertising and searching technology.  Free listing on Skilpad.Com is therefore a valuable opportunity for estate agencies to secure quality advertising exposure without any additional cost. Advertising is a major expense for real estate professionals and many agencies have been forced to cut back on adspend due to the current tough market conditions.

In response to enquiries from estate agencies, Skilpad.Com spokesman Andre Viljoen has confirmed that the portal’s free listing offer is not for a trial period only but is a cornerstone of the company’s long-term business model. “We are committed to expanding the portal both in terms of the number of listings and the amount of relevant features and content. Keeping listing free for estate agencies will assist us in our vision of empowering property buyers with a website which will offer all of the properties and all of the resources they need in order to make informed purchases.”

Easy registration procedure

Estate agencies who wish to get their listings up and running on Skilpad.Com can do so by registering online by clicking on the “Estate Agents>Register” link and completing the quick registration form. Estate agency groups who wish to register can contact Andre at andre@skilpad.com or 083 309 7030.  Agencies can choose between automatic listing, in which their properties are automatically added to the portal and updated daily, or manual listing via a control panel, which is ideal for agencies who wish to add selected properties only or those who do not currently have a website.

Skilpad.Com was developed by a Port Elizabeth-based team and launched nationally in July 2008. A few of the industry-leading innovations introduced since then are simple tools for adding video clips to listings via Internet or cellphone, a highly effective mobile search (at http://mobile.skilpad.com) and an interesting interactive property map search (at www.skilpad.com/mapsearch.php).

Many more new features are scheduled for addition to add value to the free property listing platform. In the future the portal will offer various value-added services that estate agents may choose to use for a fee.

Skilpad.Com Property Portal is proud to introduce a brand new tool that makes it a breeze to find South Africa property on the map.

One of the nifty features of the new tool, which integrates the Skilpad.Com  property database with Google Maps, is the way you can zoom in deeper and deeper and discover more and more property.

There are over 80 000 properties to find on our map. You can search in map, satellite or hybrid view. Give the South Africa property map search tool a try now!

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.

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!