'Google Of UK Property' Announces New Strategic Partnerships With Industry Giants

Press release: 10 April 2006

Today, what is becoming known as the 'Google of UK property', Home.co.uk, announced new, strategic partnerships with online giants, Fish4Homes.co.uk and PropertyToday.co.uk. These alliances make the Home.co.uk Property Search Index the largest database of UK residential properties for sale, serving results from all the major property portals.

The Home.co.uk Search Index now provides access to details of over 590,000 properties, extending beyond any single publisher portal by around 200,000, covering the vast majority of the national, residential property market. This consolidates Home.co.uk as the most comprehensive UK property search.

"Finding property is now easier than ever before. Online house hunters were tired of the 'hit and miss' process of hopping from one property advertising portal to the next. Collectively tracking property details from the UK's leading portals, along with many smaller operations, provides our users with a powerful, specialised search engine, making portal hopping a thing of the past." explained Doug Shephard, Business Development Director of Home.co.uk. Group Brand Manager of Johnston Press PLC, Toi Bisatt agreed, "We [are] really concerned about the property searching frustration of home finders."

Thanks to the new partnerships, the Search Index now covers properties advertised by the UK's five largest, regional newspaper publishers: Newsquest Media Group, Northcliffe Newspapers Group, Trinity Mirror, Guardian Media Group Regional Newspapers and Johnson Press.

Doug described how the partnerships work. "Home.co.uk proactively generates massive numbers of house hunting web visitors, producing sales leads for our partner's clients while raising the brand awareness of all participants."

Andy Prior, Commercial Manager for Johnson Press commented, "This partnership will certainly help boost the launch of our newly designed site PropertyToday.co.uk. I'm sure our estate agent clients will be more than happy with the added exposure their properties will receive."

Richard Yeo, Chief Technology Officer for Fish4 also welcomed the partnership, "at fish4homes we work hard to deliver as many quality leads to our estate agent clients as possible and therefore we are delighted to receive Home Hunter traffic from Home.co.uk."

The addition of the latest property data feeds means that Home.co.uk's intelligent search engine covers the UK's property market like no other. In today's competitive environment, estate agents have to ensure their clients' properties receive maximum, online exposure. Never before have UK house hunters been able to search such a huge proportion of the property market, using a combination of their chosen criteria, including location, house type and price. It is the easiest and fastest method of finding property for sale.

Notes for Editors

Over the last 28 years, Home.co.uk has become established as a dynamic, innovative and ethical service. By providing the UK's most comprehensive Property Search and Estate Agents directory coupled with detailed House Price analysis, Home.co.uk delivers the real power of the Internet to inform and empower estate agents, homebuyers, renters, landlords and sellers in across the UK.