Real Estate 2.0 Blog | Real Estate News Advice & Info

Properazzi was awarded on last Thursday Third Place out of a pool of about 250 participating companies from across Europe for the Startup 2.0 contest, to find Europe’s most innovative online technology start-ups.

What is Properazzi?
Properazzi is a new concept launched only 2 month ago. Based in Barcelona, the team of this new service wants to provide to its visitors the possibility of searching for properties to rent and for sale. Properazzi is however not a real estate agency, but only a property search engine that helps the visitor to look for the property of his dreams. Founded by the French Yannick Laclau, the search engine manages over than 1,8 million property advertisements translated in 29 different languages within 45 countries.

How does it work?
As a typical search engine, Properazzi crawl the web looking for real estate agencies websites from which it repatriates property offers. These ones are automatically classified by price, location, living area etc… 4000 websites are thus visited on a daily basis.

User Friendly?
Both the interface and the ergonomic are extremely easy to use and offer the latest 2.0 technology. Therefore to search a property by location, we use a Google Maps Mashup that locates all the available properties within Properazzi’s database. After this first selection, the search can go deeper adding requirements. Once the visitor has found the property of his dreams, you only need a click to go to the real estate agency offering it, keeping the possibility of comming back to Properrazzi thanks to an iframe.

Where does Properazzi make money from?
As a principal source of revenue, Properazzi will use traditional advertisement, but within 6 month from now, will propose a Premium service to real estate agencies. The ones using it, will enable their ads to show on top of listings thanks to sponsored links, based on the same principal than Google Adwords; allowing all agencies to parameter their ads directly from a back office.

This evening is the opening of the 60th International Cannes Film Festival. It is without saying that finding accommodation to attend the famous festival can quickly become a nightmare for different reasons.

Besides the ones booking hotels, many of the participants decide to book apartments in the centre of Cannes (named “the Banana”) or villas located up on the beautiful hills of Cannes, where the best parties are organized.

The rental industry in Cannes is really specific, the Film Festival being the most important event of the year welcoming over 120 000 participants on a 12 days period. But there are drawbacks to this success:

-Ridiculous rental amount asked by property owners that is often completely out of the market price.
-The budget of participants (companies or individuals) that is limited, if not decreasing. (Euro value too strong)
-More and more attendees want to stay shorter than the official festival period (sometimes less than a week!).
-Too many companies are waiting until the last minute before booking anything.

As a result, and it is hard to imagine, many apartments and villas within Cannes stay empty and owners are complaining about this situation. Therefore both the owners and rental agencies are loosing from this negative outcome.

It is time for owners to realise that they are not the ones to dictate the market rules, clients are!

PS: For the ones that are looking for last minute rentals I have some good addresses to recommend. Do not hesitate to contact me.

Nestoria, the famous UK vertical search engine for properties to buy or to rent decided to expand their activity beyond the shores of the UK with the launch of Nestoria.es, since yesterday.

Nestoria Spain is only available in Spanish which is a shame considering the growing number of English-speakers willing to establish themselves in Spain. The design of the new website is the same as the one from UK.

Nestoria provides a user friendly interface with a web 2.0 technology. The company is a property wholesaler based on the “Pay Per Click” principles.

Would such a website work for France? I would say yes, since Nestoria already has a Spanish competitor present on the French market immo.trovit.com that is based on the exact same concept. It is therefore a risk for French real estate companies to see clients going directly to owners, thus avoiding the agency fee thanks to the really precise maps provided on these websites.

It is now up to the potential real estate partners to decide if it is worth the risk or not!

Why French are so wrong about the rental market? France is one of the only rental market of the world to work with net price to the owner instead of a market price. Therefore there is absolutely no control over final market price with huge range of pricing for the same property.  This implies of course a lack of credibility of rental agents.