The idea behind our new service/website was actually born from personal experience. A few years ago we were personally looking for a renovation property that we could renovate over time due to the increase in house prices. Unfortunately it seemed very difficult to find such properties without any cost. At the time, and as it is today, there are many online services that let anyone browse property listings for houses without any cost. E.g. RightMove and Zoopla. However, all websites we came across during our search requested either an upfront payment or a monthly subscription to view renovation property listings. This, quite simply, put us off our search for a renovation property as our main aim was to save money, rather than paying money upfront before we had even started. So our aim since this time has been to build a replica of existing services that are around for standard properties but specifically created for this niche market. An open and free listing site for renovation properties and land for sale.
We have been solely working on this project for the last 18 months and as of Monday 11th November we were proud to go live with the final product. On www.renovatethis.co.uk is a free sign up page for estate agents. They can create a free account and create property adverts for free. They can attach as much information and pictures as they wish to these adverts and they are made instantly available on the site for people to search for. Rather than just limit the site to estate agents we also wanted to ensure that we had a more rounded product so created a section on the site where an individual can also create a free property listing. Individuals have a limit on the amount of information they can post but the facility is still there. For people that are visiting the site to search for renovation properties, they are presented with a familiar form where they can simply type in a town, region or post code to start their search. After an initial search they have the option to apply more advanced filters to expand their search radius or reduce results based on price. Just as they would on a standard property search website.
To help people that are interested in renovating a property we have created small pages of information relating to such things as plumbing, electrics, heating, waste as well as mortgage advice aimed at renovation properties specifically. We have tried to avoid creating an online ‘bible’ and attempted to be very brief, to the point but while being informative. A small FAQ is also available on the site that we created based on the most common questions that we found throughout property forums. In the future we hope to expand these sections to include external links to websites that contain further information or ones that have the online ‘bible’ format of renovation information.
Following the launch on Monday we started a very small marketing campaign using social media. A Facebook page is live and already being shared out and ‘liked’ by a number of people. This can be found at https://www.facebook.com/renovatethisuk. A Twitter account was also created to enable RenovateThis to interact with other people in the industry. People can follow us using @RenovateThisUK or by visiting https://twitter.com/RenovateThisUK. We already have many followers on Twitter and being tweeted about by other industry professionals. While it is early days we are very happy with this response and we are already past triple figures on page hits – without any traditional advertising.
We hope in the very near future that even more estate agents will take note and start making use of the site. Thinking further afield we hope that Renovate This becomes the site for people to go to find their renovation property, without ever having to spend money.
Thank you once again for your response and do let us know if there is any further information you require for an article. Good luck with the new site!