A popular property portal in Northern Ireland has been relaunched and upgraded at a cost of £250,000 as competition within the country’s housing market for home hunters hots up.

Propertynews, which is the country’s oldest portal and best-known, now has a slew of upgrades including allowing house hunters to contact agents direct from its search results pages.

It has had several owners in recent years after being founded in 2000 by one of the country’s newspaper publishers. It was later sold to a Belgian media firm and then a tech firm, most recently being sold to rival portal PropertyPal.

Upgrades announced by Propertynews COO Emma McNally (main image) include a smarter search function that allows users to discover properties that take into consideration desired walking, cycling, driving and public transport times.

“The new Propertynews website has been rebuilt to improve the home search experience with several new and improved user features such as natural language search, advanced travel time search capabilities and new and improved methods to connect with estate agents,” she says.

“The site is now also on a new code base to allow for agility and ongoing technical enhancements.

Smarter

“The theme of the upgrade is: Better, Faster, Familiar, because the new site brings smarter home search tools and a more personalised approach to the property journey, while retaining the trusted and familiar look and feel that users know and love.”

These improvements come a year on PropertyPal Group acquiring Propertynews and is in line with the group’s commitment to “invest in both of its property websites to drive innovation and enhance the experience for home searchers and agent advertisers”. One likely driver for this is stiffer competition within the NI portal market, incuding new entrant HomesNI.

Andrew Murdoch, Chief Product & Technology Officer at PropertyPal Group, says the site has reported strong growth recently including a 13% rise in home searchers browsing the website.