Looking back at the talking points from Property Portal Watch 2010 it seems that classifieds aggregators caused a stir in the real estate portal industry when they first sprang up.
Real estate marketplaces didn’t know whether they were a threat, an ally or both at the same time. (View Highlight)
Fifteen years or so later and now it seems like time might be up for aggregators—their business model deemed an inessential middleman by the market and their USP eroded on one side by savvy portals and on the other by Google’s relentless drive to eliminate click-throughs. (View Highlight)
Unlike real estate verticals like Zillow or Rightmove, aggregators like Trovit and Mitula are hardly household names. So what are these businesses and what is their value proposition? (View Highlight)
Often we see the likes of Zillow and Realtor.com being referred to as ‘aggregators’ but the businesses we’re talking about here sit one level further away from the transaction.
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Whereas portals typically take listings from most of the agents in their market via the agents’ CRM software, aggregators will take listings from portals via XML feeds. If they can’t convince portals to build (and, importantly, maintain) an XML feed for them, they will often just scrape the listings directly from portal websites. (View Highlight)
Once it has the listings from all the portals in a market, an aggregator will get to work building results pages that outrank the portals’ pages on Google, especially for more complicated ‘long-tail’ search terms. The idea is that because the aggregator has more listings than any individual portal and it has set up its SEO specifically for long-tail searches, it can attract a significant volume of Google searchers to its results pages. (View Highlight)
A user might search Google for “3 bedroom houses for rent with double garage and a garden in Bristol”. In an ideal scenario for the aggregator the user would click from Google to the aggregator at the top of Google’s results, then they’d click from the aggregator to the portal where they’d fill in a form to be connected with the agent listing the property. (View Highlight)
From Google to an aggregator to a portal to an agent. You can see how the aggregator’s position as a middleman was always a precarious one but they’ve been around for a long time and made a lot of money acting as a source of ‘extra’ traffic for portals. (View Highlight)
New highlights added June 28, 2024 at 12:06 PM
By 2018 most of the real estate aggregators (Trovit, Mitula, Nestoria and Nuroa) were consolidated under the umbrella of ‘Lifull Connect’ and were making decent money. In 2019 Lifull’s aggregation business* generated ¥ 7,680 million (almost $50 million at today’s exchange rate) at a 12% net profit margin.
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In its 2023 shareholder report, Lifull admitted that CPC revenue from aggregation was down 19% year-on-year and revealed that it had sacked the management of its Overseas division. The man now in charge of overseeing the segment (Kiyoshi Shishido) is the company’s former external auditor—an appointment which suggests battening down the hatches rather than investing for growth. (View Highlight)
As for Bing Real Estate, it has been decimated in its home market but is still operational in Canada (where, interestingly, it still had Zillow listings as of the 10th of June) and ten other international markets.
The faceless service seems to be selling some ad space on its detail pages but doesn’t necessarily have lucrative CPC agreements with portals.** (View Highlight)
The search giant may instead be using its aggregators just for lead generation for its rental management business which invites landlords to market their listings, screen tenants and deal with payments through its platform.
That pivoting away from charging portals on a CPC basis may be the saviour of these businesses. Former Mitula Group Chairman, Simon Baker believes that there is still a future for aggregators if they can link their leads to portals or brokerages they own (as Lifull Connect has done in Thailand with the acquisition of FazWaz) or if they’re smart about the markets and segments they go after. (View Highlight)
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