The development of Property Industry Eye is about to enter a new phase and there are some changes coming that we know will enhance your enjoyment of the publication.

These changes will be more evolution than revolution but they will make the site more user friendly and much richer in useful content.

You’ll see a subtle change on the site later this week but rather like when a friend shaves off a moustache you will probably think something is different but you are not sure what it is.

Having established EYE as a leading source of daily industry news we shall be developing the popular contributor columns.

We will also be expanding the breadth of the site coverage to give readers ever more reason to spend time on our pages and to interact with each other in discussion, debate and information sharing.

Success breeds success and EYE’s quality journalism and ability to reach a very substantial proportion of the industry has seen us become media sponsors of Landlord Law at two of their highly successful conferences, and chosen by The Property Ombudsman to sponsor their new conference in the autumn.

Other high profile partnerships are coming soon.

Of course we could not run EYE without a revenue stream and we are very grateful to our numerous clients who promote their goods and services through advertising and marketing with us.

The promotional emails that we send you on their behalf are extremely successful and we really appreciate that you respond to them.

Unlike other publications we limit the frequency of sending these emails as we don’t want to flood your in-boxes. We know that for you and our clients quality wins over quantity!

The reader engagement with EYE, both on-site and within social media, is extraordinarily high and the quality v quantity factor is again a major factor in our success.

The read counts on our stories are absolutely genuine and, we guarantee, never inflated.

We also find there is a correlation between the number of reads and the consequent number of comments. ‘Hot’ stories often achieve 5,000+ reads and 100+ comments.

Some go on to over 10,000 reads. It is rare for a story to get, say, 1,000 reads and not have a single comment.

On Twitter we have a steadily growing band of  followers – currently about 4,500 – and they very actively tweet and retweet our stories: so much so that Propertyflock ranks EYE in the top five most tweeted domains for property stories – in the same league as the BBC, Telegraph, and YouTube.

On top of that fact we were delighted to find that Cision, the global media intelligence provider, ranks EYE in the top ten of UK property blogs.

In keeping with our position at the forefront of news reporting we are taking the lead in developing a strategy for the estate agency industry to counter the extraordinary levels of negative press coverage.

The hardworking, dedicated and professional people who work in full-service agency should surely be given respect and recognition, and EYE is now working hard to try and achieve some balance in the media reporting. Watch this space!

So it’s exciting times at EYE and you as our reader are a hugely important part of the process of our development. Without you we would not have a publication.

We are here as a resource for you and for the industry and its suppliers, and we look forward to the coming months as we give you even more reasons to make EYE your essential daily read.