The online platform has become a hot spot for commercial real estate developers, agents and owners as they advertise available offices either to let or for sale, writes ALLAN OLINGO

In the past, many people looking for house and office space would have to physically search for these vacant spaces. This has now changed with the introduction of online real estate portals that have made it easier. Sites such as propertyzote.co.ke, officespace.co.ke, propertyleo.co.ke and property.co.ke are now the online sites that make real estate information available to the online community.

Collins Otieno of officespace.co.ke says that they began their portal after seeing people getting frustrated, especially because there were few sites specifically targeting office space.

“Most sites that we know shied away from office space but concentrated in residential houses are not agents but provide agents with a portal to reach their target clients,” says Otieno.

Ferdinand Kaplich, the founder of propertyzote says that the lack of professionalism amongst the real estate agents is what is leading people to the online sites. Here you will find information that is accurate and at zero cost.

Says Kaplich: “We have about 150,000 hits a month, over 320 real estate agents and over 1,000 properties listed. This shows how valuable these sites have been to the real estate sector.”

Otieno, on the other hand, says that in a day, officespace.co.ke gets between 10,000 and 13,000 hits making it over 300,000 hits in month.

“We are proud to be number one in Google page ranking. We are more user-friendly and cost effective than traditional advertising. We are different from other online platforms because we have a specific target market. Each of the 10,000 daily hits is from a person looking for offices,” he says.

Virtual offices

Says Otieno: “The listings made by agents are of standard offices, furnished/serviced offices, executive suites, meeting and conference rooms and virtual offices. We are the market leader in office space advertising. In the past two months alone, seven agents in our website have reported selling over 35,000 square feet of offices to Kenyans in the Diaspora.”

According to Otieno, in order to benefit from all the functions and information provided at their site, agents create accounts from which they make listings.

“They manage these listings themselves, with property location, salient features, prices, date of completion. Right now, we have 4,500 registered users who receive either weekly or fortnight updates of available offices advertised on our website,” says Otieno.

Another unique feature is that these sites have a system for people to register details of what they are looking for, and this is sent to the agents in their database each week. The agents can then contact these clients directly.

According to Kaplich, once someone sends a request, they are able to see it and the real estate agencies get a mail based on the enquiry.

“The copy mail that we receive helps us in monitoring responses and follow up on payment by the real estate agencies,” says Kaplich.

From the online sites, it’s coming out to be less expensive than the contemporary media and the big winners are the consumers, who spend less time in looking for houses.

An obvious advantage of Internet shopping is the availability of the search tool which basically allows the user to search for a house or office space in particular areas like Westlands and also limit them to their amounts say between Sh3 million to Sh5 million. This literally narrows down the searching, saves time and money.

Kaplich says that most sites allow the agents to manage their own listing and are, therefore, able to get their value for money.

“Not only does your listing stretch globally, but it also ensures that a targeted audience because only those interested in your service will look for it,” says Kaplich.

The online real estate market has its challenges too. Slow Internet, Internet downtime, website download speed and hacking are amongst the challenges that these providers face.

According to Otieno, the major challenge that they have is convincing agents, developers and landlords to embrace online advertising.

“Most will stick to the traditional methods, which are diminishing in effectiveness each minute. However, we hope this will change soon,” says Otieno.

He adds that they have heard of instances of online fraud and therefore, each agent must give working office numbers, emails and indicate the physical location of their offices.

“Some agents are not willing to abide by these conditions, and we lose them. However, we do not compromise on our values,” he offers.

Online challenges

Kaplich, on the other hand says that Internet downtime, especially by both Internet service providers is quite a challenge. It’s the reason I host my site in Australia where the occurrence of downtime is quite minimal.

“We have invested a lot of resources to improve our platform through increased bandwidth because we do not want to lose out on our customers.

These online portals are reaping in on the online users and they believe that the future looks bright for the online real estate platforms.

According to Otieno, there is an estimated 14.1 million square feet of vacant lettable office space in major Kenyan towns and they want to bring these to the 17 million Internet users through vigorous marketing and creation of awareness on the benefits of online advertising.

“Ours is the only website in Kenya that is strictly for commercial real estate, either to let or for sale. Finding office space has been a big problem, and we have set out to make it easier,” he says.


 

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