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Portals: race is on to dominate ‘logbook’ home data market

Leading data expert says portals are all now rushing to be key holder of data for each of UK's 28 million homes.

Nigel Lewis

property logbooks

A leading property data expert has predicted that the next key battleground for the big portals will be who has the best online information logbooks for each home in the UK.

barrott property heads portalsJason Barrott (pictured), who has worked at Zoopla’s Hometrack and property information giant CoreLogic, says all the portals are now fighting to be first to be the first ‘king of data’.

Until now most portals have fought to have the most property listing and agents on their sites.

But now it will be which one has the most information about each of the UK’s 28 million homes including historic pictures, sales data, planning information, rental history and price records.

Zoopla has already made the first step in this direction with its My Home launch, but Barrott has now joined growing challenger portal PropertyHeads.com to help develop its offering.

To be called Log Book, it will include details gleaned from PropertyHeads’ two recent acquisitions, Mouseprice – which is bought off the Daily Mail last year, and OurProperty.co.uk.

Logbooks

“There’s no getting away from the fact that data services will represent the portal battleground for years to come and I have little doubt PropertyHeads will be at the front line,” says Barrott.

Mouseprice has been around since the turn of the century and that has allowed them to develop a huge repository of intelligence with a scope and quality which goes beyond what is being provided by the major portals.

“The group’s social network offer also adds another interesting avenue for agents to explore when it comes to communicating those insights.”

April 22, 2021

4 comments

  1. This is an interesting space as we have been creating Property Log Book™ since 2008 http://www.propertylogbook.co.uk. We’ve seen loads of different offerings come and go in this market place, with varying degrees of success. EDF launched Hoppy a few years ago which sadly closed down late last year. Prior to that we had Habiplace, another great idea and offering, again sadly closed down last year. With all the varying offerings on the market one thing is clear, you will never achieve one single golden record of property infromation. So much information/data is created about a property, by many different actors, stored in many many different places, bringing it all together into one record is impossible. House buiilders create their own version of a ‘log book’, as do solicitors, estate agents, online property portals, local authorities, proptech suppliers, sales progression tools, property management companies/tech and so on. Combined with this you have the big players like Zoopla and Boomin who are providing their own versions too, so the question is, where does the consumer go to get their property information and which source should they trust. We have to remember that the consumer should be at the heart of this, as well as providing business benefit to estate agents, solicitors & conveyancers, financial intermediaries and the mortgage lenders. I think the work that the likes of Askhomey, Buildingpassport, Myhomepassport, Bold Group etc are doing is brilliant.

  2. It is great that property data vaults are being discussed and we believe that they may well be the next land grab.

    However, unless the property community understands how vital it is to actually put information inside them and educate a vendor to understand the value of up front data, they will all be hollow vessels.

    We have seen many over the past months and there are some amazing examples of what a supportive environment can look like and the value it can add to a transaction.

    We look forward to being able to tell more of our clients where they should store their Searches for when they are sale agreed. As it stands at present, the search data is mostly kept in their email inboxes and then manually shared when the time is right.

    We are looking forward to having constructive conversations with data vault suppliers about where they can help clients.

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