Inman

Property portals: Global Top 100

Editor’s note: This item is republished with permission from Global Edge Marketing Ltd. The original post can be viewed here.

All of the property-search portals in the top 20 share one of two characteristics: They are either outright market leaders or they are the main challengers in large established markets, most notably in the U.S.

Realtor.com (U.S.), Soufun.com (China), Rightmove.co.uk (U.K.), Funda.nl (Netherlands), Immobilienscout24.de (Germany), Seloger.com (France), realestate.com.au (Australia) all dominate their respective markets. Arguably, Immobilmente.com is the market leader in Italy.

Market leaders "own" their categories and are referenced naturally on the Web, which goes someway to explain their dominance. They have also been around longer and acquired links in the days when Web masters responded to link request e-mails.

I’d be willing to bet that in five years’ time, there will be very few new entrants into the top 20 from portals in established markets. Dislodging market leaders is extremely difficult. It’s often more efficient to set fire to a large pile of cash! The new entrants are more likely to come from China, Russia, India and perhaps South America — large, immature markets with low Internet penetration and plenty of room for future growth.

Ranking the portals

We opted to rank the sites by the number of unique inbound links rather than the more sophisticated measure of MozRank. This is because the MozRank scores of the top portals were so similar that in many cases we were concerned how significant the results would be by using this as the main criteria. We have included both measures in the table.

  Position Portal name Covered Areas
Moz Rank
Unique domains
  1 Realtor.com US 6.82 18,197
  2 Soufun.com China 6.16 15,514
  3 Zillow.com US 6.3 11,780
  4 Homes.com US 6,5 9,854
  5 Immobilmente.com
Italy 5.7 7,962
  6 Funda.nl Netherlands 6.38 5,284
  7 Focus.cn China 6.34 5,025
  8 Trulia.com US 5.84 4,793
  9 Move.com US 6.42 3,457
  10 Realestate.com.au Australia 6.61 3,351
  11 Gdeetotdom.ru Russia 5.29 3,037
  12 EscapeArtist.com
International 5.79 3,014
  13 Immobilienscout24.de Germany 7.29 2,535
  14 Rightmove.co.uk
UK & Overseas 5.76 2,534
  15 Immowelt.de
Germany 6.39 2,394
  16 Domain.com.au
Australia 6.59 2,280
  17 Anjuke.com China 5.1 2,009
  18 Homegain.com US 6.3 2,007
  19 Immonet.de
Germany 6.08 1,719
  20 TheMoveChannel.com
Overseas 5.98 1,718
  21 Seloger.com France 6.08 1,413
  22 HomesGoFast.com
Overseas 5.22 1,377
  23 FindaProperty.com
UK & Overseas 6.11 1,311
  24 Primelocation.com
UK & Overseas 6 1,150
  25 Daft.ie
Ireland & Overseas 5.33 1,121
  26 Propertysold.ca
Canada 6.24 990
  27 Globespanproperty.com
Overseas 5.06 985
  28 Jaap.nl Netherlands 5.24 965
  29 Propertynow.com.au
Australia 4.51 892
  30 Facilisimo.com
Spain 6.43 883
  31 Kyero.com
Spain 5.56 833
  32 Propertyfinder.com
UK & Overseas 6.13 805
  33 Property-Abroad.com
Overseas 5.88 796
  34 Hemnet.se
Sweden 4.46 781
  35 Immobel.com US & Overseas 4.55 776
  36 Spanish-living.com
Spain 4.62 768
  37 Idealista.com
Spain 5.29 766
  38 Realtor.ca
Canada 5.68 728
  39 AMLAspain.com
Spain 6.01 702
  40 Viviun.com
Overseas 6.01 683
  41 PropertyShowrooms.com
Overseas 4.78 673
  42 Myimmoworld.de
Germany 6.1 672
  43 Propertysalespain.co.uk
Spain 5.95 661
  44 Thinkproperty.com
UK + some other 5.1 654
  45 Mondinion.com
Overseas 5.24 647
  46 Casa.it
Italy 6.08 639
  47 Estateagents123.com
UK & Overseas 5.19 611
  48 MyHome.ie
Ireland & Overseas 5.15 589
  49 Condo.com
US 5.28 587
  50 Green-Acres.com
Overseas 5.52 581
  51 Duproprio.com
Canada 5.11 547
  52 Countrylife.co.uk
UK 4.68 523
  53 Indiaproperties.com
India 4.77 518
  54 SunshineEstates.net Overseas 4.29 425
  55 Bovision.se Sweden 4.22 492
56 1-property.ru Russia 4.6 463
57 Fotocasa.es Spain 5.58 462
58 FrenchEntree.com France 5.22 447
59 Idealspain.com Spain 4.88 432
60 Realestate.co.nz New Zealand and Pacific Islands 5.45 429
61 HotProperty.co.uk UK & Overseas 5.42 427
62 Immobilien.net Europe 5.4 424
63 Thinkspain.com Spain 5.42 422
64 EuropeanProperty.com Overseas 5.42 419
65 Immobilien.de Germany 5.57 407
66 PropertyIndex.com UK & Overseas 5.81 396
67 Medhead.com Overseas 4.12 389
  68 Proprietesdefrance.com France 5.22 384
  69 Holprop.com Overseas 5.52 379
  70 Property.com.au Australia 5.51 371
  71 Yourkeytospain.co.uk Spain 5.02 362
  72 French-Property.com France 6.43 358
  73 Buscainmobiliarias.com Mexico 6.84 357
  74 Yourestate.com.au Australia 6.69 357
  75 Indiaproperty.com India 5.08 347
  76 Fish4homes.com UK 4.57 336
  77 S-immobilien.de Germany 4.7 316
  78 Look4aproperty.com UK & Overseas 5.27 315
  79 WorldofProperty.co.uk Overseas 4.03 315
  80 Homesworldwide.co.uk Overseas 4.34 308
  81 Flatmates.com.au Australia 4.6 301
  82 Leapfrog-properties.com France 4.27 287
  83 Realestateview.com.au Australia 5.22 286
  84 Globrix.com UK 5.1 282
  85 Prendicasa.it Italy 5.29 280
  86 Myhome.com.au Australia 5.62 278
  87 FrenchPropertyLinks.com France 6.42 276
  88 Metroscubicos.com Mexico 5.84 274
  89 Mybulgaria.info Bulgaria 5.1 273
  90 Aussiehome.com Australia (Perth and Western Australia) 5.49 267
  91 Propertyworld.com Overseas 5.16 266
  92 HomesOverseas.co.uk Overseas 4.14 264
  93 Property-net-spain.com Spain 5.37 263
  94 Propertymagnate.com Overseas 5.27 257
  95 Immobiliare.it Italy 5.91 256
  96 KeyItaly.com Italy 4.9 250
  97 Eurekasa.it Italy 5.92 248
  98 Thaiproperty.com Thailand 4.51 229
  99 Immobilier-canada.com Canada 4.93 224
  100 HomesandProperty.co.uk UK & Overseas 5.52

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Seattle-based search marketing portal SEOMoz caused controversy in November last year with the launch of a LinkScape, a tool that crawls 34 billion URLs. Your own Web site is probably in its index and is currently being used to calculate the popularity of your own site and sites that you link to.

LinkScape attempts to replicate the most important elements of Google’s algorithm and then provides quantitative scores that allow you to benchmark your own site against those of your competitors. It’s an ambitious project and the results are not perfect, but it’s the best tool available on the Net, far better than using Yahoo Site Explorer, the next-best alternative.

Using LinkScape to rank the world’s property portals

Although Global Edge has good coverage of English-language overseas portals, we often get asked by agents for recommendations on which portals they should use to target non-English-speaking markets. It’s a question we’ve found difficult to answer, especially as we have never been able to find a definitive list of global property portals. This article is our attempt to build a list of the world’s "most important" portals. Hopefully you can use it as a starting point for researching marketing opportunities in a variety of overseas markets.

Methodology

Our first step was to ask our multilingual team to compile a long list of more than 200 property portals from across the globe. The list is inevitably biased towards the language skills of the team. We have native English, French, German, Spanish and Russian speakers. Our Chinese and Japanese left a lot to be desired, but we did try!

Secondly, we excluded large classified sites like Oodle and Yahoo to ensure we were comparing like with like. Finally, we ran each portal through the SEOmoz LinkScape Tool to see which portals were the best referenced on the Internet. To do this we looked at two metrics:

Anomalies

The biggest problem with the methodology is that each link is counted equally. Companies with lots of low-quality links could theoretically appear much higher in the rankings and therefore appear stronger than they actually are on the search engines. This appears to be the case with immobilmente.com which is listed fourth in the table. Its MozRank score is much lower than the surrounding portals, suggesting it is not as powerful as the rankings suggest.

Copyright © 2009 Global Edge Marketing Ltd.