Nestoria UK Blog

This month we speak with Henry Yates, founder and CEO of recently launched start-up estatecreate, a service designed to make it simple to create a single property website and distribute it. Henry has a long history in the UK internet start up scene; prior to estatecreate he co-founded Face the Youth planning agency and Univillage, a social network for students.

Henry, a few questions:

1. What is estatecreate? What problem does it solve?

Estatecreate.com allows property owners to easily create their own website for their property and then automatically distribute their content to property classified sites and portals via feeds.

We give property owners all the tools they need to market their own property. Estatecreate enables owners to differentiate the presentation of their property by having their own look and feel, a stand alone website and their own URL. We also make it easy to list their property on multiple sites without having to register and re-upload all the details separately on each site.

2. How do you see the economic downturn effecting the private seller space?

Everyone is looking for opportunities to save money so I think sellers will increasingly look into promoting their own property alongside using an agent. Sellers that go down this route may still ask an agent to handle their enquiries in return for reduced commission.

3. In most European countries private sales make up a significant percentage of the market, but in the UK the percentage has traditionally been very small. Why? Do you see this changing?

I think this is primarily due to the differences in the way portals operate. In most of Europe the property portals offer private sales as well as agency listings, giving home owners the choice of marketing their own property or using an agent. The main portals in the UK have not historically allowed consumers to list their own properties making it difficult for home owners to easily reach a decent size audience.

I do see this changing for two reasons. The first is that we are offering UK home owners an effective way of marketing their own property. Estatecreate allows home owners to reach a large audience of buyers by aggregating lots of classified sites where you can list your property privately. The second is that new entrants to the portal market such as Globrix, Zoomf and Zoopla! will force the market to start to move away from annual subscriptions to a performance based model, fragmenting the market. A more fragmented portal market will make it easier for portals to take on private listings.

4. To what extent has the change in consumer internet technology, be it mass market sites like Facebook or YouTube, or specialist sites like Nestoria changed the way people search for and market classifieds?

Great question. I think sites like these have had a huge impact on consumer behaviour. In terms of search, people no longer start their search for a property with an agent. Instead, they start their search using sites, such as Nestoria, that allow consumers to easily search for property knowing that they are seeing the majority of properties for sale on the market.

Sites such as Facebook and YouTube have made people much more comfortable using web applications and publishing on the web. We believe that these sites have paved the way for consumers to embrace web applications such as estatecreate to market classifieds.

Thanks Henry, it’s great to see the pace of online innovation in classifieds pushed forward. We agree with you that as users become more used not only to always-on high speed bandwidth, but also with the shift from being merely consumers to becoming participants in the media process, the potential exists for radical changes in behaviour – and thus also in business models.

past Nestoria interviews: Andy Allan, Stephan Uhrenbacher, and Gary Gale.