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TheMoveChannel.com was founded in November 1999 by Dan Johnson.
It started life as a simple guide to the buying procedures for residential property
in the UK, coupled with a directory of website reviews covering property sales
and rentals, again primarily in the UK.
Guides
Over the first couple of years, more guides were added, for finding, selling,
letting, renting, and moving house. The in-house editorial team also wrote a
range of independent guides for dozens of different financial services
products, in support of various commercial affiliate relationships with
different providers.
Website Directory
The website directory was also a focus of activity in the early years, with
thousands of sites being systematically reviewed for inclusion across dozens
of different property and personal finance categories. The database has recently
been restructured to provide a framework and platform for international expansion
and now lists more than 45,000 website reviews.
News
An independent news service has been a part of the site since August 2000.
Every working day we keep property professionals and interested punters
up to date with the property-related news, which is sent out by email to more
than 18,000 subscribers and is featured not just on TheMoveChannel.com, but
on more than 50 other sites where our service is syndicated.
Content
While the news service represents the backbone of the magazine element of
the site, plenty of other features have been added over the years. There has
been a long-running weekly piece of editorial, as well as calculators, highlighted
property selections, house price monitoring, forums and TV show opportunities,
many of which have also featured in our regular e-zine updates.
Property listings
Towards the end of 2003, the decision was taken to indirectly enter the international
property market, by listing property from multiple agents and developers on
a pay for performance basis. Following a period of development, properties
from the first partner went live in April 2004.
This element of the site has rapidly become a cornerstone of the business,
with partner sales climbing past the £100 million mark during the first
2 years, during which time over 600 partners have signed up, offering over
50,000 property listings in around 90 countries worldwide. A further enhancement
of the property service has been the private sales solution, which allows
members of the public to list their properties for sale online for a single
low fee and no commission.
Investment Property
One of the key success factors has been our focus on investors and the delivery
of various specialist investment property newsletters, which now go out
to a combined audience of more than 25,000 subscribers. There is also a
more personalised service for over 2,000 registered investors, which delivers
timely alerts whenever a new investment property is added to the site that appears
to be a suitable match to their investment profile.
Technology
During 2005 and 2006 there was a major investment in the technological infrastructure,
database systems, staff, software and hardware, with the deployment of a range
of Content Management Solutions, reporting, administration and analytical
software tools. This enabled us to redesign the network for the first time in
more than 5 years, both visually and in terms of usability and functionality,
providing a solid technological base for ongoing expansion.
Growth
Throughout 2006, the focus was on accelerating the growth of the partner database,
increasing the volume of the property listing database. This has been achieved
through increased marketing expenditure (allowing us to feature at a large number
of property exhibitions), rollout of our network of country-specific sites,
increasing the size of the sales force and through distribution of our
property database to a growing network of key websites, including fish4homes,
Home.co.uk, Property Abroad and Homes Overseas.
Quality
Size isn’t everything and usability is an important issue for any property
listings service. We have a wide range of data management tools to remove duplicate
listings, reduce dead images and provide a standard structure for location information,
which will ultimately allow us to integrate a worldwide mapping service.
The Future...
TheMoveChannel.com is currently developing the “TMC Suite”, a
set of online software tools on the Microsoft platform that are aimed at estate
agents around the world who wish to improve their website offerings through
the integration of property listings database management, enquiry handling,
tracking, reporting, client contact management, sales reporting and email marketing
solutions within a single web-based software system. The product will be ready
for launch in 2007.
We also have plans for multi-language listings, a mobile version of the
site, an increase in UK-focused activity, the introduction of video elements
to the site, user-driven content, site personalisation tools and lots more beside...
Our Location
Our office (shown with the red marker labelled with the number 1 on the image below) is a stone's throw from Tower Bridge and around 10 - 15 minutes walk along the river from London Bridge Tube and mainline rail stage (shown with marker 2), Tower Hill Underground station (marker 3) and Tower Gateway Docklands Light Railway station (marker 4).
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