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

Social media like facebook and twitter continue to change the way that people interact. But are they effective in real estate marketing?

If you have experience or knowledge of successful social media marketing of real estate, I would love you to comment on this post. I would be especially interested if you have pertinent feedback on marketing South Africa real estate.

Powerful, yes. But can it be harnessed?.

My gut feel is that while social media are nothing short of revolutionary when it comes to connecting people for genuinely social reasons, they will not so easily be harnessed by marketers to promote their products and services — or properties.

Social media evangelists state somewhat provocatively that social media “are the economy” and that soon we won’t search for products and services, they will find us! I agree that certain standout products and services will benefit enormously as a result of online friends recommending them to one another. But I wonder if marketers will be able to utilise this peer-to-peer-recommendation potential at will. I suspect that the ever expanding army of social media users will become skilled at filtering out “spam”.

But even as I write, great marketing minds are eyeing the spoils and preparing their campaigns. What are your thoughts and experiences?

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 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.