After much consideration, it has been decided that the New Zealand branding of The Property Brain, Think Property will in part be funded by unobtrucive advertiments. The decision came about in order to mitigate costs and provide a better service.

Why Will Profits From Adverts on Think Property be Passed on to Customers?

Although it sounds like spin to get extra profit, but it’s not. The cost of hosting a website, such as Think Property is in the server hardware and internet connections. The more visitors that there are to Think Property, the more powerful the servers have to be and the faster the internet connection has to be to accommedate this. Given that all these costs will be paid for by people listing their properties on the website, advertising on Think Property can significantly reduce the cost to sell your property.

It was decided that advertising on each page is the best way to reduce this cost  because people listing property want the most number of views and the cheapest listing price. Clearly the number of views a property listing gets is directly related to the cost of listing, so using adverts that pays per view cuts costs and allows listings to be cheaper.

Cutting down the price of listing is nice for Think Property customers, but collecting  money from advertising based on the number of views ensures that Think Property can be maintained and function properly as it grows in popularity.

More Information About the Decision to Advertise on Think Property

Think Property has decided to use Google as the prefered partner for advertising on the website. This is because Google tailor their adverts to the content of the particular webpage that is being displayed. Think Property believe that if their customers have to look at adverts, at least the adverts should be relevant to the things they are viewing. For example, if a visitor is viewing a residential listing, they will most likely get adverts regarding mortgage offers, services local to the area the house is in or perhaps adverts for other houses for sale in the area.

Nearly all Think Property pages have been designed now, with only 5 (or so) pages left including the website backend. The project is almost ready to go to the next stage which is data base design then Think Propery’s coding. Due to various New Zealand holiday’s and designers taking leave, it is estimated that Think Property’s design stage will be completed either next week or the following week.

SEO has continued on the site, generating links at a slow pace to ensure that Think Property appears in search engine listings when people from New Zealand search for the website.

So far Think Property development has been slow, with the design stage taking most of the effort at the moment. Although on a positive note, a start has been made on the Think Property backend which will be used to manage estate agents accounts, add estate agencies, manage erroneous property listings, rental periods, etc…

Last month Data Support (Think Property’s developer) went to TechEd which was interesting to see lots of nice information on databases (used for the backend of Think Property), security and website hacking information and also a presentation from the technical team at TradeMe (soon to be a competitor).

In other property news, there have been a number of other property websites popping up, especially in the UK. Zoopla, for example is a new site in the UK whose marketing is targetted at the rental market and is offering some nice features including a house valuation tool (something that will be built into Think Property, but has been kept secret as it was previously not offered on other property websites). Naturally, the emergence of new Property websites with different ways of thinking is a concern, however although these websites are offering things that Think Property will offer (such as property valuation), we believe that Think Property will do it better and in a more innovative way!

This is an exclusive preview of the overall theme that will be used for “Think Property”. It has all the special features removed and artifical data put into it so as not to give away any information about the points of difference over other property websites. Please note that this is only a theme, not the completed design – but it does look fairly similar.

Enjoy

Think Property Theme Released to Public

This is the first public release of the design of the site that the whole of New Zealand will use for searching for houses for sale by 2012

Now that the Think Property theme has been completed, the guys at Data Support NZ have started rendering Think Property pages in html. This is a slow process, but it has to be to get it right. I can’t talk too much about the features that are within the pages for confidentiality reasons, but suffice to say the Think Property homepage has been rendered and part of the property search results pages have also been rendered in html. The property database hasn’t been started yet, so no properties have been uploaded yet and you can’t use any of the features – that means no searching for properties, although I can say at this stage there will be some clever ways to search for property / houses / land, etc… within the site.

Think Property has now completed the design stage. The newly created Think Property design has a blue theme and focuses on the ability to clearly present property news and allow users to search for houses, appartments, land, etc to buy.

This is the new website for Think Property! Think Property is the New Zealand branch of The Property Brain. Think Property and the property brain are an initiative of Data Support, our website designers and will be the number one place kiwi’s go to:

• Buy property
• Buy houses
• Buy farms
• Buy appartments
• Buy land
• and more…

More information about Think Property to come!