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Hyperlocal in the UK

Rightmoveplaces and hyperlocal sites – what do you think?

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Rightmove.co.uk is an huge website – on some days with more web traffic than the BBC.  They provide an online advertising service to member estate agents.  A hyperlocal offshoot of Rightmove called rightmoveplaces is in quiet beta.  you can find them on Twitter.  The idea is to give people a flavour of the place in which they want a house and to signpost resources.

This makes sense to me – in Kings Cross I get a steady trickle of enquiries from people who read my site and want to know what it’s like  to live in (good BTW) and no doubt others form their own impression by reading the site.  Curiously very few hyperlocals cover the local property scene.  I have done one article by a local estate agent but it didn’t generate much interest.

Rightmoveplaces has already been discovered by one or two hyperlocals (I see the magnificent Ray of Hedonblog is in there) and I have put in some content on Kings Cross and a link to my Kings Cross site.  It’s a nicely designed framework site that offers a page for just about every place name or area in great britain and serves up localised pics with space to comment and contribute and an interesting house price game.  I’m not quite sure about the voting bits, but understand that, in many cases is as much as visitors are prepared to do.

I’ve seen a few national hyperlocal framework sites come and go – they usually suffer the empty restaurant problem, if there’s not content  on your area then you move on and don’t contirbute that becomes a vicious spiral.  Also anyone following the hyperlocal debate will have been inundated with naff american ‘hyperlocal realtor marketing seminar’ nonsense of which we have seen little in the UK.

Given the sheer size of the parent website and the national obsession with housing I met with Rightmoves to try and understand it better (declaration: they paid for a coffee and a pain au chocolat).  The following arose in discussion:

  • rigtmoveplaces is only intended to be light touch , to give a flavour, linking out to others with more detail
  • rightmove want a rounded picture of an area, warts and all
  • there’s no intention to have ads on the rightmoveplaces site – people will be referred there from rightmove.co.uk
  • rightmove is genuinely interested in feedback from hyperlocals and wants to engage
  • would hyperlocals be interested in having an RSS feed into the places site?
  • rightmove has vast amounts of detailed data about local property markets that could be of interest to hyperlocals

The reason we run the kings cross site is to help people understand the area, they need  to understand it most when thinking about buying a flat. I’d be happy to have an RSS feed from my kings cross site on rightmoveplaces. Yes, a big company gets my content for free but I get a link back from a potentially colossal site and importantly no one is trying to sell naff advertising there around my stuff.

The burden though would have to be on me to put an RSS up there, not for them to steal my stuff without asking – reassuringly there seemed to be no intention to do the latter.  And also for me to be able to take my feed off if the nature of the site changes.  It’s all about manners and approach.

Lot’s of interesting issues here – what do other hyperlocal publishers think? Would you work with a site like this? Are you afraid of estate agents? Are bricks and mortar the future for hyperlocal? Would you RSS your stuff into the places site?

Let us know in the comments.

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William Perrin

Founder of Talk About Local, Trustee of the Indigo Trust, Tinder Foundation, 360Giving, co-founder Connect8, former member of UK Government transparency panels, former Policy Advisor to UK Prime Minister, former Cabinet Office senior civil servant.Open data do-er, Kings Cross London blogger. Loves countryside. Two small children.
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Comments

  1. From my point of view I would love to have The Lichfield Blog syndicated onto the Lichfield page. It makes perfect sense and would provide a useful addition to anyone looking to buy or rent in Lichfield to see what’s going on. Just like you would check out the local paper of an area if you’re looking to move there. Very simple, common sense thinking from Right Move.

    I couldn’t see a way to submit my feed so maybe you could introduce Will?

    There’s also potential for content to go the other way too. For example, I would love to put that “what people say think about Lichfield” bit on our site in the form of a widget. It would helpfully encourage our readers to contribute their thoughts about living in Lichfield, improving the usefulness of Right Move’s page.

    Also, as I think ahead to other features we’ll add to the site, we would like to provide property listings. I’ve attempted to ask Right Move before about syndication but hit a very solid brick wall. Maybe they’re ready to be a bit more open in that sense now.

    Obviously I’m veering onto commercial relationships here where hyperlocal sites, rather than creating their own property listings areas like newspapers effectively have, they syndicate right move, expanding the views right move can claim but also adding a sort of referral/affiliate network, too. The odd bits of commission this might give hyperlocals will help with sustainability.

  2. I’m with Philip John on this one.

    I like Right Moves approach, and it’s not a snatch and grab of content that we have seen happening before.

    Yes, we may have to sign ourselves up, but that won’t really take long and I think it’s in the hyperlocal bloggers best interest. You can also control the removal of your RSS feed should you see fit.

    When buying a house naturally you want to see what’s happening in your area, and where better than a hyperlocal blog in my opionion. It’s a grass roots view of the area, and you get more flavour with hyperlocal blogs than say, statisical information (which is also useful too).

    There have been a couple of occasions when I’ve got talking to people viewing flats in Wake Green Park and they have asked questions about estate which I’ve happily answered and also pointed them in the direction of the blog. As long as people can find Right Move Places easily enough (and I’m sure they will), then I think it would be a lovely addition and co-operative partnership.

  3. Will described Rightmoveplaces as in “quiet beta” and I think that’s true and provides an opportunity for Hyperlocals to build an early relationship with that website and organisation – and it provides a useful link for our audiences.

    I was very pleased with the Rightmoveplaces and reviewed it on HU12 http://hu12net.blogspot.com/2011/01/rightmove-places-househunters-can-share.html and the offer of publishing the Hedon Blog RSS feed followed soon after (they approached me via Twitter).

    I follow the local property scene and feature the occasional property update on the Blog so find Rightmove essential. By the way, it’s well worth seeking out a local Estate Agent to help. I have a friendly one who will offer his views on the local housing market if asked, which is interesting as those opinions quite often contrast with what the big property organisations are saying.

    The clever and fabulous Paul Smith who publishes http://www.hu17.net produces his own Beverley Property Guide which refers people to Rightmoves. See http://www.beverleypropertyguide.com/

    Another interesting website to visit is OurProperty http://www.ourproperty.co.uk/ You can register and find the prices of every house sold in your area. Again it provides material for the odd blog post.

  4. I have just signed up and have thought about adding my RSS to the site but I am airing on the cautious side because of potential duplicate content issues with Google etc.

    Have you given the full RSS feed, or extract?

  5. Will described Rightmoveplaces as in “quiet beta” and I think that’s true and provides an opportunity for Hyperlocals to build an early relationship with that website and organisation – and it provides a useful link for our audiences.

    I thought the Rightmoveplaces website was useful and reviewed it on HU12 http://hu12net.blogspot.com/2011/01/rightmove-places-househunters-can-share.html and the offer of publishing the Hedon Blog RSS feed followed soon after (they approached me via Twitter).

    I follow the local property scene and feature the occasional property update on the Blog so find Rightmove essential. By the way, it’s well worth seeking out a local Estate Agent to help. I have a friendly one who will offer his views on the local housing market if asked, which is interesting as those opinions quite often contrast with what the big property organisations are saying.

    The clever and fabulous Paul Smith who publishes http://www.hu17.net produces his own Beverley Property Guide which refers people to Rightmoves. See http://www.beverleypropertyguide.com/

    Another interesting website to visit is OurProperty http://www.ourproperty.co.uk/ You can register and find the prices of every house sold in your area. Again it provides material for the odd blog post.

  6. This looks very interesting, I’d certainly be interested in seeing how Blog Preston and Right Move Places could potentially work together. I like some of the features they’d put on.

    I guess they’ll see which ones work and then slim down from there. But it’s a great use of their data and might help shift a few more houses?

    It’s building on the ‘About my Area’ stuff, so when you’re looking at houses and you want to know more about the area they can integrate the stuff from the places site.

  7. thanks for the comments folks. one thing that came out of a twitter conversation with @bounder of birminghamitsnotsh*t was the potential for some local estate agents to particpate in the information about an area in a non spammy way.

    one of the reasons (in my view) that national top-down framework sites haven’t worked is the lack of local agents on the ground with a clear motivation to provide content. not all estate agents are tech-savvy, indeed many are quite the opposite. but they do have an interest in useful information about their area online to inform house hunters. if even a small percentage of the agents involved in rightmove take part positively in rightmoveplaces then there could be an interesting additon to the hyperlocal scene.

    however one has to aim off for optimism bias in coverage – good hyperlocal sites take a balanced not booster-ish view of their area, not something all estate agents are noted for.

  8. I’d definitely be interested in submitting the RSS feed of http://digbeth.org to the Digbeth page and, like Philip John, would love to have a “what people say think about Digbeth” widget.

    The only ‘but’s’ in my head are:

    Like Darren says, potential duplicate content issues with Google (as I’ve written about on this blog, I’m quite happy having a high Google ranking at the moment!).

    The second is an issue that arose with myvillage.com publishing RSS feeds of non-commercial hyperlocal sites on their commercial webpages. Hyperlocal sites sometimes publish others’ online content that’s under a creative commons non-commercial license (e.g. Flickr images), so does that present problems when this content is republished on a commercial site via an RSS feed? No doubt some way around this, just something I feel I need to be mindful of.

    But overall I’d be very happy to see Digbeth is Good on the Digbeth page.

    Nicky

  10. I love the idea of being able to tell people about where I live – but one of the main things I’d love to read about are comments from people in my own apartment block or street. When you’re selecting a place to live, you just don’t know what to expect unless you’ve lived there before.

    For example, does the rubbish truck come every Saturday at 8 am and wake you up? What are the neighbours like? Does the maintenance company actually answer their phones? Loads more, but sharing what I’d see as almost granular-local instead of hyper-local, is where Rightmove should be going.

    This beta website looks quite interesting too… http://blockchalk.com/

  11. I’m sceptical I have to say.

    I can see it working in some areas, where there are things going on. Take Parwich for example this would work really well for them, but would they take my feed from PnP?

    Maybe but It doesn’t show the city in a great light, we don’t knock the city but we are honest about what is going on.

    The Rightmove service is to help sell houses so I would imagine that cherry picking will go on

    I hope I am wrong though.

  12. Hello all, some useful comments and I hope you don’t mind contributing here.

    The intention for Rightmove Places is to give our home-hunters an at-a-glance view of the places they are interested in, based on using user-generated content, for every location across the UK.

    We’re aware that this brings us quite close to hyperlocals and I’d like to think we can offer something to to the scene. Looking at some of the excellent hyperlocal websites helped by TAL and others I see the type of info and views that would be invaluable to someone trying to find out more about an area – candid, enthusiastic, constructive, informed – and hope that hyperlocal practioners would like to review their places in a similar way on Rightmove Places.

    In return we can hopefully give something back to hyperlocal sites who have a presence on our site. That’s not only in terms of sheer traffic volume, but if you think that somebody searching for a property in Hedon (as an example) will have already picked up some nice insights into the area from Ray’s comments and will be aware of the Hedon Blog thanks to the news feed before they’ve even moved, then hopefully you’ll have someone fully engaged in their hyperlocal community when they arrive there.

    Just to answer on a couple of points raised:

    Google duplicate content – The feed only takes an extract from the article and then links back to the full article which will benefit the originator.

    RSS feeds – We won’t be taking any RSS news feeds without permission, but would be happy to receive submissions for each area from relevant hyperlocal sites. Please email these over to me or message via Twitter @rightmoveplaces

    Shared commons material – At present we don’t carry any advertising on Rightmove Places and are actually using shared commons material ourselves in the form of Panoramio images on each place page. By and large if the originator of the RSS feed conforms to creative commons licence there shouldn’t be any issues.

    Happy to field any further queries on this page or if you’d like to contact me directly then feel free: tom[dot]mcguigan[at]rightmove.co.uk

    Thanks, Tom

  13. Mike makes a good point about the negative content, it would be interesting to see how that developed. Surely you are not getting a true reflection of a place if it all positive.

    I have added a few pieces of content for the Leeds pages, and it seems that the other RSS feeds are extract, as only part of the content is published, with link to the original, which is good because it tells Google (and other search engines) which is the original content.

    Providing you can remove the RSS feed easily (I didn’t see anything on the site about RSS or it’s removal, but tweeted the rep on Twitter about it) then it is worth trying and monitoring the results.

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  2. […] Rightmoveplaces and hyperlocal sites – what do you think? | Talk About Local * rigtmoveplaces is only intended to be light touch , to give a flavour, linking out to others with more detail * rightmove want a rounded picture of an area, warts and all * there’s no intention to have ads on the rightmoveplaces site – people will be referred there from rightmove.co.uk * rightmove is genuinely interested in feedback from hyperlocals and wants to engage * would hyperlocals be interested in having an RSS feed into the places site? * rightmove has vast amounts of detailed data about local property markets that could be of interest to hyperlocals (tags: hyperlocal estateagencts property rss) […]