5 of The Best (and Worst) Portal Market Reports From Around The World: September

As Juwai IQI Chairman and occasional Online Marketplaces columnist Georg Chmiel said in a recent article, “portals are the new real estate data companies”. Hardly a day goes by without a new report released by a property portal full of insights based on an ever-increasing pool of data which property portals are becoming better and better at managing, interpreting and ultimately, using as a marketing tool.

While the price of a two-bedroom flat in Spain or the average profitability of buy to rent properties in Singapore might not be interesting or relevant for everyone, the way in which these reports are conceived and used by property sites is increasingly so.

Every month we’ll be bringing you the highlights of housing market reports produced by property portals from across the world. For now, here are a few interesting reports we’ve seen. 

Spain

Idealista: No country’s portals clog up my feed with more house price reports. Spanish portals have definitely realised the value of producing house price data reports, and more importantly of writing them up well, making infographics for them, and sending them as natty little press releases to get maximum coverage. And here we are covering this one from idealista.

Takeaways: Return on investment for residential property in Spain has dropped over the third quarter of 2020 and now stands at just 7.9%. Industrial and commercial properties, offices and garages have not seen a drop in profitability.

Notable for: We’ve always been fans of the humble infographic, and idealista almost always accompany their reports with infographics to show you what you need to know at a glance.

Malaysia

PropertyGuru: PropertyGuru has a news section of its property portals in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. They pump out as many as 4 or 5 stories per day. In this case, Malaysian Country Manager Sheldon Fernandez has released a statement to the press based (we presume) on the portal’s data.

Takeaways: Property prices in Malaysia are stable and may recover faster than expected despite the impact of the global pandemic

Notable for: This statement from a country manager did not appear on PropertyGuru Malaysia’s own website, only in third party press stories which struck us as odd.

USA

Zillow: The biggest portal company out there was hardly going to miss out on this trend. Zillow is perhaps the most prolific of report releasers among the world’s property sites and releases a ‘Market Pulse’ every few days citing third party and Zillow data as well as one-off reports, publishing them in their own special Zillow Research section.

Takeaways: In their latest report, Zillow partnered with Yelp to produce a report which concluded that Sunrise, FL, Lancaster CA, and Temple AZ are among the 10 most affordable suburbs with a city-feel.

Notable for: Very much on-trend, the report was looking at a very specific topic that has sprung up since the pandemic. Well written and formatted and bound to get coverage in the local press of all 10 of the suburbs on the list. Clever.

Germany

ImmoScout24: The German market-leader has used its data to produce its latest report named ‘How Germany Buys’.

Takeaways: The advice offered such as “The fewer competitors you have, the higher the chances that you will win” is pretty banal, but that’s not really the point of this report.

Notable for: Slick format with a nice interactive map and playful graphs make the presentation of data much more accessible to the average user.

Northern Ireland

PropertyPal: Although the portal only has properties in Northern Ireland and has a relatively small staff, one of those is a “Chief Economist” whose job it is to produce quarterly reports. The latest PropertyPal Housing Market Trends report is just as well produced and thorough as anything Rightmove might make.

Takeaways: To quote the report itself: “The post-lockdown housing market has displayed considerable resilience. House prices have increased, engagement on PropertyPal is at an all-time high and there were close to 7,200 properties sold in the last three months.”

Notable for: Even a regional player with as few as 14 employees (according to Linkedin) is dedicating enough resources to produce a 13 page glossy pdf quarterly report around the housing market.