Nestoria UK Blog

Fellow Nestortonians,

in your internet wanderings you may have come across long-time property industry expert Bob North’s recent post over at Estate Agency News discussing the comprehensiveness of various property websites (portals and search engines). Bob’s monthly analysis is always interesting, if you’re not a subscriber I recommend you become one. It’s a must read here at Nestoria HQ.

His attention this month focuses on a seemingly simple question: “How many property listings do the various players have?”. We get asked about this all the time. As we’ve always tried to stress here on the blog in our occasional discussions of Nestoria Rank, comprehensiveness is an important metric, but only one of several, the others being usability, freshness, and of course relevancy. Nevertheless, probably because it seems so easy to measure, comprehensiveness seems to be the metric people fixate on. We think it is given far too much importance, despite having some major weaknesses.

First of all, which listings get counted? We believe users are interested only in relevant results. So, should we count listings that are sold or “sold subject to contract”. Given that we focus on helping individuals find a place to live, should we include commercial properties? We think not, and do our best to exclude such listings from our index. As another example, we often see things like parking spaces listed. Of course people need parking spaces for their cars, we just don’t think they belong in a residential property search engine.

Secondly there’s the question of duplication. Often we have the same listing from multiple sources. Is that one listing or multiple? Another good example is when we see very similar units all in the same building or development. Sure different flats may have slightly different dimensions or prices depending on the view and such, but is a user really seeing many different listings? Or are they seeing one option in their choice of where to live?

Next, there’s the issue of sampling bias. When comparing only one or to areas it’s easy to (knowingly or unknowingly) skew the results.

Finally, of course, comparing search engines and portals is a bit like comparing apples and oranges. The two provide very different user experiences with only marginal overlap.

So in conclusion, yes, as Lenin once said “Quantity has a quality of its own”, and of course having a comprehensive offering is critical. But, as with almost every web metric it’s important to understand the meaning behind the number. Comprehensiveness is easy to misinterpret and even then it’s only one ingredient in the property search recipe. Rest assured dear reader we’ll keep our attention on all aspects of creating a compelling service.

Please let us know what you think of our efforts and how we could do better.