Skilpad.Com Community Blog

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.

The South Africa Property Portal Skilpad.Com is shortly running a competition to identify estate agents who make the best use of the new virtual video tools on the portal.

The tools make it really easy for estate agents to add video clips to their property listings. More news on the competition shortly. Meanwhile here are links to some property listings that include video created by the new tools: Seafront flat Summerstrand and Summerstrand apartment for sale.

Estate agents who list properties on Skilpad.Com are automatically entitled to post news or articles on this blog. Here is how: Log in to your control panel, click on “My Reports” and “Add Article” and away you go.

As a visitor to this blog you may comment on any article. Click on the “Comment” link at the end of the article, then click on the “Log In” link and log in if you are registered or register and then have your say.

If you are a real estate marketing expert and would like to contribute news and articles to this blog, then send us an email to support@skilpad.com and we will get back to you promptly.

Skilpad.Com Property Portal has introduced two new tools that enable estate agents to add video clips to their property listings.

With these tools agents can choose to add video to their listings via the Internet or directly from their cellphones.

One of the goals of Skilpad.Com has been to provide estate agents with a really easy new way of adding impact and useful visual information to their property listings. Video was chosen as the ideal medium to achieve this goal as most estate agents already routinely use digital cameras and cellphones with video capabilities. The new Skilpad.Com tools simply make it quick and easy to transfer this video directly to the desired property advertisements on the property portal. The video tutorials at how to add video to property listings show just how easily this can be done.

To the best of our knowledge, Skillpad.Com is the first property portal in South Africa to provide its users with video tools. It is also, possibly, the first in the world to offer a tool that uploads video directly from cellphone to agents’ property listings.

Anybody who has owned a website for a while will have received a spammy email from a “search engine optimization” expert who claims to have visited their site and noticed that they were not registered on major search engines”.

I chuckled recently when I read on a Google support site that the world’s leading search engine company itself receives this email: Dear Google.com. We have visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most major search engines and directories.

The Internet is full of self-proclaimed search engine optimization (SEO) experts who take advantage of website owners’ legitimate aspirations to improve their visibility on search engines. As a property website owner you need to be cautious when it comes to paying for SEO help: you could pour money down the drain or even worse, you could incur Google penalties that would decrease your search engine visibility or even get your site blacklisted.

As a general rule I advise that you should ignore websites and unsolicited emails that:

The truth is there is not quick fix method to achieve great search engine visibility. It takes time, perserverence, application and above all the commitment to build and maintain a quality website that delivers real value to visitors.

So where can you go for guidance on SEO? A good place to start is to study Google’s Webmaster Guidelines The Google Webmaster Help Forum also full of useful advice. You will gain knowledge that will assist you in your own SEO efforts. And if you do decide to hire an SEO professional to assist you, you will be better equipped to find the right person.

Every second of the day, so it seems, somebody, somewhere in the world posts a message on the community networking website www.twitter.com, affectionately known as Twitter.

I first heard about Twitter late last year, and sceptically registered on the recommendation of online marketing experts who rated it as one of the frontrunners of the so-called Web 2.0 phenomenon that is changing the way that business utlises the Internet.

Messages posted to Twitter are called tweets and may not exceed 140 characters and are supposed to answer the question: “What are you doing”? The idea is that over time, like-minded people follow your tweets, and of course you selectively follow the tweets of others. All of this seemed distinctly dubious to me when I registered and as if to confirm my worst suspicions, nobody was following me: I was tweeting to myself.

But after a few months, something has changed. I have gained some followers and I am following some interest marketing people around the world. I can see the embryo of a valuable information network and I am curious to see whether it will lead to increased traffic on this blog and on our property portal.

Just search on the Internet and you will find plenty of info on the Twitter phenomenon. And if you are interested in South African property matters and/or online property marketing, why not follow me on Twitter by clicking on this link!

One of the most common mistakes I notice when viewing South African property listings on the Internet is that many of them provide very little information and either do not display photographs or use poor quality photographs.

If you are an estate agent who lists property on your own website or on property portals such as www.skilpad.com, you would be well-advised to review your listings to make sure that they do not fall short of the minimum requirements for effective Internet advertising. If your ads are too thin on information, property searchers may pass them over in favour of other listings that paint an appealing picture through the liberal use of information and pictures.

I suspect that one of the reasons for skimpy listings is that the property industry in South Africa is in a transition period from advertising predominantly in newspapers, where the cost of space is high, to advertising more and more on web-based advertising where space is cheap. Having sold a number of properties through the Internet over recent years, I have learnt that one of the great strengths of the Internet is its ability to reach potential buyers in other parts of the country and the world. Potential buyers who are far away do not have local knowledge, and so welcome informative listings that spell out the features and beneftis of the property and the area. And all potential buyers appreciate good pictures.

Here are some guidelines to help you ensure that your property listings meet the grade:

1. For residential listings include at least the price and location of the property, the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, and the size of the property. Preferably also include information about other rooms and features of the house (swimming pool, entertainment areas, great view, etc.) the size of the buildings, and information on proximity to schools/shopping centres, etc, and security features.
2. When listing farms and smallholdings, follow the general principles above, but also provide information that has a bearing on the agricultural/eco-tourism potential of the land, e.g. vegetation, topography, carrying capacity, infrastructure, water, electricity, crops, stock, game, proximity to tourist destinations, etc.

The same philosophy applies to any other type of listing: try and put yourself into the shoes of the people who are searching online and do your best to use words and images to sell the property to them before they even set foot on the land.

Good luck with your listings. If you need any help or advice with improving the quality of your listings on our South Africa Property Portal, you are welcome to email us at support@skilpad.com

Skilpad.Com Property portal has attracted the attention of international property portal watchers who have ranked our name as one of the top 5 most crazy in the world ( See the Crazy Name Awards list )

Crazy? Maybe. But we believe that our name is different and memorable and that this will help to make it a household name in South Africa.