The private sales and new homes website that bans estate agents has confirmed that it is behind another site – Onthemarketdirect.com
The iPropertycompany said that this domain name “will form a big part of our UK marketing strategy”.
It also said that its ability to acquire the domain name “highlights the fact that the Agents’ Mutual OnTheMarket team is more concerned with stickers in shop windows than they are about securing conflicting domain names”.
The company revealed the connection after Eye approached it with a query prompted by a reader who had noticed that both sites had the same host.
‘On the Market Direct’ sets out its stall as an apparently independent and impartial tool for the public to compare online agents with high street businesses.
However, while ‘On the Market Direct’ reveals no connection with the iPropertycompany, its “comparison” table makes the latter stand out, well ahead of the likes of Purplebricks
John Candia, CEO of iProperty, said: “The launch of OnTheMarket this week has done nothing other than disrupt the status quo which existed to protect estate agents.
“Thanks to them, over 4,000 traditional agents are now forcing home owners to rethink the whole industry and that is extremely beneficial to us.
“Property sellers now have an extra decision to make because they won’t get instant access to the two major portals via an OnTheMarket traditional agent.
“Of course we are not the only winner as this will also benefit online estate agents as they can offer listings on both Rightmove and Zoopla, giving clients far greater exposure than OnTheMarket can with their‘only one other portal’ rule.
“Having launched ‘On the Market Direct’ over a month ago I can report that we are very happy with the results and this domain name will form a big part of our UK marketing strategy.”
Last night, OnTheMarket declined to comment.
The “comparison tool” is here
Comments (60)
How long before one of the point scoring, name calling, contributors tracks another down and shoots him? Surely OMT (only a matter of time!!)
Ha ha i have an image in my mind now of a gun waving Harree bursting in on RealAgent and shouting along the lines of Samuel L Jackson in Pulp Fiction "Ask me my profession again! i DARE YOU, I DOUBLE DARE YOU!"
Brill – I anticipate Real Agent being on the scene too – along with Wilko screaming 'Show me the evidence!' – all good fun and all top men I' m sure, truth be told.
I stand corrected by OTM is a registered trade name from a few weeks back, was it not? So the same situation applies as previous post of someone else using the name!
I'm correct, registered with UK Gov July 2014 as are similar names. So all the hot air above from the anti OTM brigade was for nothing?
The name was announced mid July by which time the trademark was in place. It was a coup at the time and the team were congratulated for their attention to detail.
Just wondered if anyone has checked whether or not "onthemeerkat.com" is available!!!!! Sorry – couldn't resist.
We did that one on July 17th Jon
And … you don't need £Millions to tell the public these domains exist … you only need PENCE … I'll leave the smart marketing EA's to work out why.
With reference to domains such as http://www.rightmovehampshire .. http://www.rightmovezoopla etc., YOU CANT USE THESE DOMAINS !! The reason … RM and Z are trademarked names and it would be deemed as passing off even if you registered the name and tried to use it. That's why RM and Z don't need to register every variant of the domain. By comparison, "on the market" is a commonly used phrase and it cannot be trademarked … there is absolutely nothing to stop EA's registering http://www.onthemarket(their town/city). This is why AM should have chosen a name like Zoopla, Google, Twitter, Youtube etc., which can easily be trademarked and protected against what will now inevitably happen to OTM … unfortunately for AM … the cat is out of the bag.
And of course that is exactly the post an "estate agent" would make…..you are such a charlatan! Last time I looked right and move were two words frequently used in the english language and used by a little old removal company over in northern ireland.
Not a charlatan RealAgent … just an EA who is a lot smarter than your rose tinted AM blinkers will allow you to see. And by the way … calling me names yet again shows that your debating skills are at the schoolboy level.
You're credentials have been questioned twice in this post alone and in one of the other articles Harree, so I think its fair to say there is no smoke without fire. As for schoolboy well to be fair I guess thats what makes me a great salesman and you the failed agent now working for Zoopla….well for a while longer anyway.
Doh * your. Fill your boots on that one!
To be fair Real Agent I am trying to find out if Harree is a business owner, a junior neg or somewhere in between. I am trying to understand the apparent disjoint between running a succesful Estae Agency business and those who think KPI's established over decades are suddenly wrong.
You'll be lucky to get him to admit it Robert. Ive been goading him (mostly for my own childish amusement) for weeks now to "come out of the closet" but he refuses. The tell is always the venom in the argument. No proper agent is going to be anti the concept of OTM. Some may feel it won't work, others may have a rye smile if they believe it won't and their competitors join it, both of those arguments are fair enough, but no one is going to argue against with such passion other than a: a portal rep or b: an online only agent.
"You're credentials have been questioned twice in this post alone and in one of the other articles Harree, so I think its fair to say there is no smoke without fire." REALLY? I just think it shows that some AM agents are arrogant enough to believe that anyone who disagrees with their rose tinted views cannot possibly be an EA … do you believe the 75% of EA offices not promoting OTM are all staffed by RM and Z employees? And RealAgent … how much more of your self backslapping do you need to try and convince us (and yourself) that you are a 'real agent'? You've told us you are a "the LEADING agent in my area" … "a great salesman" … and also by implication that you are a font of all knowledge for all things estate agency, marketing, IT and of course spelling. I'm surprised your office door is big enough to get your head through.
RealAgent says "No proper agent is going to be anti the concept of OTM" … Here are two posts from last week … Harree on January 23, 2015 at 10:54 am said:
Property Pundit, I am entirely behind the principle of an agent owned portal and entirely behind reducing portal costs. However … it is my opinion that AM's one portal ruling is fatally flawed, not enforceable, not in ours clients or the professions best interests, likely to cause damaging media publicity, likely to cause deep divisions among local AM and non AM agents, damage the reputation of our profession further and lead to massive free media publicity for online agents who the media will portray as being excluded purely in the self interests of high fee traditional AM agents. It won't only be AM agents who will be damaged by OTM … it will be ALL agents to one degree or another. That's why I am against it.
wilko on January 23, 2015 at 1:32 pm said:
Prop Pundit…..Harree has said that he is not against OTM on a number of occasions, to be fair. I think, unless I've been hoodwinked, that he is one of a very small minority on this forum who is a genuine agent (with no self interest) that is concerned that OTM will prove to be divisive and not in sellers interests due to the one other portal rule.
RealAgent. As wilko commented, I have said a number of times that I support the concept of AM but not the execution. I also said this:
Harree on January 26, 2015 at 7:44 am The OTM TV ad is, without doubt, the best portal TV ad by a mile. I have said many times to my RM and Z reps that their TV ads are far too 'clever' and will leave many scratching their heads as to what the ad is actually about. OTM's ad agency has come up with a great 'on the button' ad with a nice twist with the OnTheCoast, OnTheHill angle. The OTM site though is way behind RM and Z."
You really do need to pay more attention RealAgent … it might help you to make more relevant comments rather than the 'goading' comments that only you appear to think are amusing.
Oh Harree, Im sure I could trawl the posts and find others to ague my case, but I am aware of the fact that we are cluttering up the pages of these articles. I will correct you on one thing however I have never claimed leading anything, in fact I have ridiculed you for have it claimed it in the past. Now Robert has posed you a question and I think ignoring him is terribly rude……….
RealAgent, I have answered every question I need to answer, including Robert's, in my previous post. Unless he hasn't realised that I own my estate agency.
Have they got a £*** million budget to tell the public they exist? Me thinks not!
I have just checked to see if "OnthemaketXXXX.co.uk/com" is available in my area and surrounding it is! unbelievable!!!!!!!!!
Sorry market! (i would have expected the incorrect version!)
Oh my god so is rightmovehampshire; rightmoveberkshire, rightmovesurrey and rightmovelondon!!!!
well if you check out rightmovelondon.co.uk it goes to ….. RIGHTMOVE!
The domain is available to purchase, which I think was your point was it not!?!
And would you adam and eve it, so is zooplalondon, zooplaberkshire, zooplahampshire…..need I go on!?!
I would have thought with "Member agents" in pretty much most towns and cities in the UK that they would have purchased them for the nominal couple of quid. As most large companies do. They buy up com/biz/net etc to protect their brands and also misspelling as if you have somebody who types the wrong domain but close to it they want them to end up on their site.
Well at the risk of repeating myself Zoopla have and Rightmove haven't, so you think presumably that all of these companies are wrong for not having purchased 43,000 domains not including counties and districts??!!!
And if you swap the town from the back to the front that's actually 86,000 towns or put another way just shy of a Million quid for just the co.uk!! I haven't even started on if you add the word "in" to any of those!
Well i guess you feel passionately about it RealAgent. I'm not bothered as not part of OTM but i do feel they dropped the ball on this one. Member independent agents around the country and they have been very good at putting stickers in windows (whoppie) but cannot even think ahead to register a couple of domain addresses for the towns/cities and villages they cover which would have been a massive advertising coup. If i was with OTM i would buy up my areas domains.
in fact i will do it and point them at my website just to prove a point for ten quid!
I don't feel over passionate about anything SP and do you know what I seriously doubt OTM will get it right completely. They seem to have a problem getting my logo uniform across my offices for instance, but criticism is fair when its even handed, you seem to think OTM have dropped the ball for something that RM and Z haven't done either. Stick your £9 back in your pocket and sign up to OTM, I am a normal agent in a normal area and I can genuinely say I think our properties on the site look fantastic, I don't care about the national stats posted, I know that for the properties we have listed this week, we have had calls, details downloaded and thats all without really many of the buying public probably knowing about the site yet. If I'm honest and I mean no disrespect by this either, I don't really care whether you join or not but as one agent to another and I appreciate its early days, but we have three calls from vendors who have all said their properties look fantastic on the site. Website traffic aside, you and i both know we don't sell any more houses being on both RM and Z, we would sell the same if we just took the leads from one of them, OTM is an instruction winner, plain and simple.
Agree with what you say in the most part, as Harree has mentioned about the trademark issue (which i was acutally unaware of) you can see why they perhaps should have protected themselves. As for OTM as an instruction winner? still to be seen if it is but wish it and you all the best 😉
RealAgent I suspect if you truly believe that your reply to SP 'I don't care whether you join or not' then there is no hope for OTM. If many more agents don't join you will find yourself as the biggest fish in a very small pond. Where do the fishermen trawl for Cod? Not in the pond at the bottom of the garden but in the Ocean where the most fish are to be found.
Well thats a massive shot in the foot for OTM! – what an oversight. very embarrassing and shows a degree of incompetence. On the plus side i am sure the direct to market route with this name will fail but still a silly oversight of OTM to allow it to happen.
I'm sorry SP but how is it? Ive just searched on therightmove and it comes up with a removal company. Where OTM supposed to buy every word in the english language that can be added to its domain?!
Were even……before someone comments and by someone I of course mean that well know LEADING estate agent.
'known' RealAgent not 'know' Tut, tut, tut.
Ah there he is…..Harree there's a question Robert posed for you above. I was going to answer it but it seemed rude opening someone else's post.. As you can imagine I did laugh when I saw it though!
Hells teeth I am in trouble; Harree is and Egnlish teacher, and one of those patronising bastads that made my school years a misery.
Quote [the partner that trained me] " Robert you can't spell but boy can you sell!"
Yes they should. If you look at any large corporation they register all variants.
Well as I have just showed you Rightmove didn't?!! There are 171,000 words in the english language are you seriously suggesting a site register all of them as variants on their name!?!
Are Onthemarketcheaper. com/.co.uk/. biz/ . London /.et all available too? How about http://www.onthe marketwithoutdealingwithspivs.con, http://www.onthemarketmuchcheapness? It genuinely doesn't matter, all this is the necessary pillory expected from someone in Mr Candia's postion. To maintain credibility as the CEO he has to be vocal and prove himself smarter than Ian Springett, his audience will think him magnificent others will just chuckle.
I think Robert summed it up nicely, but when I read press releases from companies like this I simply think that its smacks of deluded individuals who can revolutionise any industry because they are IT and don't wear a tie to work. They are not estate agents, do not understand estate agency, do not understand what is involved in selling a property (which means getting it to completion not just getting a bid on it) no do they understand the motivations of sellers or why they select the estate agents they do. They also do not understand that actually many of us have been using IT in our estate agency businesses for years, we simply also appreciate that its an aid to face to face dealing with customers not a replacement for it. I suspect if Mr Candia tells himself he's a "winner" enough times he may well believe it, but he will be the only one who does.
90% of the time when “tie wearing” experts says this about their industry they are right. The other 10% of the time the “IT people” do rewrite the rule book.
You will not know if the “tie wearing” experts are wrong until such time as you can’t do anything about it – and if I could predict how an industry will go on this, I would be VERY rich.
Knowing (not just predicting) where an industry is going is not a route to untold riches. The stuff I designed in 2001 is only just being rolled out as cutting edge and only a handful of IT people have yet caught on to the stuff I was benchmarking as useful to Agency in 2004. As demonstrated by OTM, Agency is very conservative and even with the knowledge of where things are headed, convincing Agents, winning their trust and respect enough to drive change takes a while.
https://www.123-reg.co.uk/order/domain?X-CSRF-Token=e0c08f75a515e5b348aabd3a1b61fe7ff5671090&domain=onthemarket
A very smart, and deliberate, move by John Candia. If he can SEO his site better than OTM can SEO theirs … guess what … his OTMD will appear at or near the top of Google and Bing searches for OTM … and he picks up a ton of free traffic to his site on the back of OTM's expensive advertising … a very, very, smart move.
It is clever (and opportunist) but i don't think they have the budget or skills to achieve that. They may well pick up some listings but will not be a figure to really worry about.
Can I ask if you are an Agent Harree and if you are your background in agency? I am not wanting to be mean but I am genuinely trying to understand where all the wrongness about selling property is coming from. I would be confident in my ability to walk into any established agency anywhere in the country and within a week understand the local market and be winning profitable saleable instructions and as a result sell property at commision levels equal to or higher than the average in the area. I am confident because that is what I have been trained to do. I would not be confident setting up from this keyboard an agency in the same area and stand any chance of winning a single instruction. The big difference between me and those advising the likes of Stellios, Candia and everyone else pouring cash into this apparently emeging sector is that it is not the marketing of a property that agents get paid for and as such the portals and the internet are simply a means for lazy Negs to delegate their workload off onto the public.
He is most definitely NOT an agent Robert, this is clear from ALL of his posts over the past couple of months.
And the fact he hasn't commented on ANY no OTM articles!
It is a bit disappointing that Harree is posting and says he wants mature debate but he doesn't want to discuss the points he has raised with me. He isn’t wrong with some of the points he is raising and it is a shame that history in getting in the way of what could be a lively, interest and informative discussion.
Robert… I believe that 'Harree' IS an Agent – and that he is from somewhere in my neck of the woods here 'oop North. If I had to hazard a guess where I would say Durham or South Tyneside – and I also had an inkling which firm he works for… although I seem to remember him intimating that he was a business owner which would scupper that part of my belief.
He says below he is the boss, that goes a long way to explain his strength of opinion and why locking antlers with him won't get very far. It doesn't explain why he can see any sense in what Mr Candia has done. Optimising a single site is bad enough, squaring the effort and the expense doesn't make sense especially when Mr Candia like Easy, Hatched Purple, Optim and all the rest are all trying to recruit the same base level staff who are happy to work on what will undoubtedly be zero hours or self employed contracts where wages will struggle to meet minimum wage. Genuinely I would love to find out the inspiration for so many business folk rushing to be passive intermediaries.
I am not surprised On the Market have declined to comment, that would be like asking Interflora to comment on the the chaps that sell Roses on the A40 Westway at East Acton. This story demonstrates Mr Candia is unaware how the structure of the industry and the fees has been shaped by client satisfaction and consumer demand over at least two generations. Yet again I am repeating that Agency is a service industry and by removing service the likes of Mr Candia and their customers end up with nothing; a cheap bunch of roses that are are already a bit disapointing by the time one gets to the M25.
There is a certain irony in this whole affair, Mr Candia's co founder is Brian Blake of Swinton Insurance, the only national High Street chain of insurance brokers. Yesterday I got a call from Matthew, I have been dealing with Matthew for 24 years, I am a loyal customer. Each year we discuss why I am loyal; I get service from Matthew to the extent where he knows a bottle of Jonnie Walker Blue Label would be of more value to me than the soppy cashback scheme they run even though the cash is worth £50 more than a bottle of J.W. Blue. The irony I see is Mr Blake understood service and his old business still thrives off it in the face of Internet competion yet Mr Candia wants to compete with an industry where service rather than flogging product is the basis of the industry. All very strange!
Purely done to create a headline, total load of tosh and EYE should not bother giving this rubbish the exposure they so desperately long for.