Skilpad.Com Community Blog

Nothing slow about this tortoise. Skilpad.Com Property Portal has just passed the 100 000 property listings mark.

Skilpad.Com which lists property for free for South African estate agencies was launched in 2008. This tortoise is going places!

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

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

Selling game farms and hunting farms is what we do at African Showcase Realtors. But marketing a hunting concession on a private farm is new for us and is possibly a first in South Africa.

On offer is a US$ 420 000 concession to hunt on a top Eastern Cape farm for 5 to 8 years. The investor and his guests stand to make a 10% annual return on investment through discounted game prices. Furthermore the investor will be assured of 4-star accommodation on-site during hunting trips (quality of accommodation close to hunting locations is a bugbear with many overseas hunters). The owner of the farm, who plans to use the concession income for game fencing, purchasing more game and upgrading the lodge, believes that potential investors who might otherwise have considered buying a game farm in South Africa might prefer this route as they get to enjoy the benefits without taking on the risk and hassle of running a farm.

Read more about this ground-breaking marketing intiative here.

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

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.