Renthusiast2.0

It’s been about 18 months since Byte Play Ltd, the company that owns Extate.co.uk was founded by Douglas De Jagger and Artemi Krymski, two post grad computer students from Imperial College.
Late last month, Byte Play announced that Extate had now received their first major round of funding from The Accelarator Group (TAG), the venture capital conglomerate who had previously backed Lastminute.com, Last.fm and Agent Provocateur. This past weekend Artemi and I had a chance to catch up over coffee and as expected, we ended up discussing some issues surrounding the funding plus and future plans for Extate, now that they have some heavyweight players backing them up.
TAG chose to back Extate over the other property vertical search engines – Artemi claims – because of a crucial difference in their business model over other vertical property search engines. Many bloggers assume Extate is basically the same as other vertical search mash-ups; throw a crawler out, grab some data, mash it up, get a funky logo and and voila, deal done !
But pay closer attention,and you will notice differences, some subtle, some not so subtle, perhaps the biggest being that Extate only produces search results directly from estate agents website and not via third party ‘property portals’ such as Findaproperty.com, Propertfinder.com, or Rightmove.
Nestoria, Oodle.co.uk and the popular OnoneMap.com offer a significant portion of their search results from portals, but Artemi feels that this deteriorates the quality of their search results. He mentioned the popular ‘flyboarding’ strategy that many agents use, when advertising via portals and believes that close to 30% of all listings on portals are actually ‘flyboards’:

“What that does, is when a customer calls in about a property he’s seen advertised, the agent says that the property has been sold and then offers them another one, or takes their details for their database.”

Artemi feels that the information on the agents website is always fresher and more up to date than what’s on the portals and that by crawling agents websites for data, the Extate engine is much more beneficial for consumers. What is also quite unique about Extate, and what probably makes them technically superior to their rivals is the ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI) technology which they employ in gathering data from websites.
The Extate AI analysis tool, not only crawls the web for property data, but is also able to extract useful information out of the sites it crawls, enhancing user experience with the ability to specify price and property location on a particular site. So for example , if a user is looking for a ‘2 bed house over 300 sq ft’ the Extate engine simply does not just use simple text-matching to match user queries to webpages. Instead the patented AI technology permits the Extate engine to extract information such as square footage details and other information from within the estate agent’s website. No two estate agency websites are designed the same and the search parameters vary from website to website.
The AI analysis ultimately answers the users query in a ‘natural language format’, something that no other property search engine in the world is currently doing, a process that Art describes as ‘technically challenging’, but clearly worth the effort if it translates to a greater user experience and increased consumer traffic.
A search on Extate takes the user straight to the source of the original listing, extracting data using artificial intelligence, and like pretty much all vertical property engines, they do it all for free; neither the agent nor the consumer pays for the service. So of course the challenge is to make money and the problem is that right now they’re not making much. At the moment people tend to look at Extate and other vertical search engines with a lot of curiosity, deciding the best of the bunch is probably the one that’s most “fun” but does anyone really take them seriously?
Rightmove, of course has a bunch of traffic and record profits as over 13,000 agents pay a minimum of £250/month to list properties on the portal. But can this model last with the new players like Extate offering such a viable alternative? In today’s downward spiraling property market ‘free’ is a very tempting word for an agent, but the problem of course is that Extate hardly has any traffic and for the moment, don’t seem much of a problem for the likes of Rightmove or Findaproperty, but:

“the portals realize we’re a better model for agents, they’re extremely happy we don’t have traffic but they realize thier approach probably will not last much longer. if not us, then maybe Google, who knows, but the information will be free”.

Things change quickly in the world of 2.0 internet, and things are changing quickly in today’s property market. Extate seems poised to take advantage of this atmosphere in that their technology is unique, and their business model transferable and expandable at relatively short notice.