Changing the way that property is searched and advertised in South Africa
Friday, October 17th, 2008 by Andre ViljoenThe title of this post sums up the challenge that we have taken up. And by “we” I mean the founders of South Africa’s new property portal www.skilpad.com .
So what do we want to change? We want to change SA from a country where most people look for property by consulting ads in various print publications, to a country where people search for property online.
Why do we want to bring about such a change? Print advertising is very, very expensive but in the present environment most estate agents have no choice but to pay up if they want their properties to be seen. It is putting many agencies under huge financial strain. And ironically, as long as the South African public rely on newspapers and magazines as their main source of property information they are settling for second best. Due to the cost and physical constraints, printed ads can only provide very limited information about available property. First prize for the public would be an online property portal providing easily searchable, well organised, information and pictures about all of the available property in South Africa.
How do we plan to bring about such a change? By building, branding and promoting a website that offers the public everything they could want from a first choice property portal. And by offering it to estate agents at a small fraction of the cost of print advertising. Have a look at www.skilpad.com which we launched in July 2008. Let us know what you think.
Who are we? Neil Dorward, Collin Schwagele and Andre Viljoen, three guys from Port Elizabeth, with a background in real estate, IT and advertising. Do we face a big challenge? Yes, but we are passionate and persistent (See out first post – 2nd killer tortoise - which is in fact a copy of our Skilpad.Com October online newsletter).
How can you help? You can help enormously by telling others about www.skilpad.com and/or this blog. (You could use this link to tell a friend )
You can also help by offering suggestions or constructive criticism: we value all input. And finally, if you have a website, you can help us by linking to us as follows: TITLE: South African property for sale and to rent at Skilpad.com; URL: http://www.skilpad.com
Because we are so new, we are still working hard to increase our search engine rankings: we are making good progress each month but it is an inevitably slow progress. By spreading the news about Skilpad.Com and by linking to us, you can fasttrack this process!
Thanks for reading this post!
- Andre
