Portals – the gloves are off

A few short weeks ago, very few people outside the residential property industry had heard OnTheMarket (OTM); a substantial number of those within the industry had heard of it but weren’t too interested; and just over 20 per cent of the UK’s agency branches actually bit the bullet and signed up to membership of the UK’s newest property portal. OnTheMarket’s stated aim was to disrupt the market and it is certainly doing so, at least it is disrupting the daily business of estate agents who seem to be spending an inordinate amount of time on forums, sniping and snarling about who’s bright enough to make the move and who is too daft to do so. But recent statements from OTM have moved the ‘disruption’ to a new level. The new portal says that it has just had its one millionth unique visitor – a claim that has delighted its member agents but is proving difficult to verify. Is it really  one million unique visitors or just one million visits? Most of us now know the difference and it is a big difference – unique individual people or just visits? OTM has said that Hitwise data is incorrect but it doesn’t…

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