Skilpad.Com Community Blog

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!

South Africa’s fastest growing property search portal, Skilpad.Com is adding property research to its range of services.

The idea is that the growing number of property buyers and real estate professionals who regularly visit Skilpad.Com to view property for sale or to let will now also be able to tap right into a wealth of relevant property-related data and information. Visitors will benefit immensely from having one comprehensive and easily accessible destination for all of their property search and property research needs.

In a first step towards implementing its ambitious research goal, Skilpad.Com now has economic indicators (currency exchange rates, etc.), property calculators (for determining bond costs, affordability and payment strategies) and a property news feed. Soon, these humble beginnings will be reinforced with deeds office data (title deeds, suburb price trends, online valuation), mapping data and a storehouse of other statistics and tools that will provide visitors with information that will assist them to make wise property decisions.

Watch this blog for more news on research developments on Skilpad.Com!

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

The 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