I’ve been wanting to cover international real estate technology in detail for quite some time, but have never gotten around to it until now. PropertyFeast in India paid for a sponsored post via the Press Release submission tool built into this site (their Press Release is already live). The company, started in 2010, is bootstrapped and has been incubated by Kundalini Pictures LLC, a Mumbai & Los Angeles based media company.

Everywhere I travel (I’m a travel addict), I check out real estate sites in the area. For the most part, they are all stuck in the dark ages. News flash to the international real estate techies reading this. It’s not the year 1995, or even 2005 anymore. Yet international real estate sites seem stuck where real estate sites in the US were about a decade ago.

Most portal home pages scream brochure site built in 1995, cluttered with as many ads and crap as possible in the hopes that the user will click on something (preferably an ad). PropertyFeast is the cleanest international portal site I’ve come across in the last two years. The home page addresses the core user scenario, which of course is searching for property. Since PropertyFeast is one of the few well done portals out there (I’m not going to write about crap), I agreed to cover them with a sponsored post. That said, I know the majority of you aren’t that interested in the fact that all of RE/MAX India’s listings are now syndicated to PropertyFeast, so I thought I’d spend a bit of time and take a deep dive into their site and see what we can learn…

What they are doing well:

  • Simple – The site is 100% focused on finding apartments and homes, with no clutter.
  • Conversion – Simple and to the point is what converts traffic to leads. It’s obvious from the home page that they get this. The entire home page is dedicated to getting their audience to view listings.
  • Photos – unlike most international portals that focus on getting as many listings as possible regardless of quality, PropertyFeast takes a hard stance and doesn’t allow any listings with no photos.

What needs improvement:

  • Design – Not that the design of the site is bad, it’s just bland. My gut is design of sites focused on an international audience doesn’t matter as much as it does here in the US because the competition is so bad. That said, I think they could spend less than $5,000 and get a fairly good design completed to take them to the next level.
  • Social – The sites needs to focus on building community. Connecting and humanizing their users and advertisers. Perhaps some sort of match making service that helps people in India find others to share apartments with. A good starting point would be to focus on turning their twitter account into a conversation rather than broadcasting.
  • SEO – 25k pages indexed is a good start, but there is work to be done on optimizing for the long tail. For example, listing detail pages such as this should be targeted at address searches.

As you know, I’m a firm believer in simplicity. Too many websites try to be all things to all people — and fail miserably at everything. When searching for a home or apartment, every buyer and renter wants to see listings as quickly as physically possible — and PropertyFeast delivers exactly that without the confusion of irrelevant information and ads cluttering the user interface. Now, if only more international portals figured that out we’d be in business…