Oxfordshire: Local estate agents beat property portals in online search

Estate agents with local offices in Oxfordshire perform the best in online searches, beating competition from large property portal websites, according to new research.

The research, carried out by local digital marketing agency Indulge Media looked at finding out which estate agent websites were most likely to show up in online search on Google. 

Of the 18 towns that were reviewed in the county, only one large property portal website, Right Move, managed to claim top spot in a town, which was Henley.

Chancellors claimed the prestigious number one spot as Oxfordshire’s ‘power brand’, appearing in the top-five list for 11 towns in total, more than any other website.

Right Move, the only portal website to appear in the ‘power brands’ list appeared in the top-five results for seven towns.

In Oxford city, local estate agent Oliver James claimed first place, with an impressive visibility rating. Similarly, local agent Martyn Cox narrowly beat Chancellors and Oliver James to the top spot in Witney.

The research also summarised the top-50 websites across the county and found that only three property portal websites broke into the list, with Prime Location appearing in position 22, Zoopla in position 11 and Right Move in position four. 

Commenting on the results, Indulge Media’s UK managing director Paul Wood said: “It’s fair to say that we were pretty surprised by the results.

“Working in online marketing and understanding Google searches we know the importance of having a local, physical presence. Having said this, with high street struggles well reported we expected to see bricks-and-mortar estate agents losing out to larger property portal websites.”

Continuing, Wood summarised: “The research is clear, agents with a local presence are outperforming large portals when customers are searching online.”

The research is likely to make happy reading for local estate agents while property portal websites like On The Market and Sarah Beeny’s, Tepilo fail to make the top-50 in the county.

Searches by town

The research also looked into how many searches were carried out by town, looking at 18 towns in Oxfordshire, from Banbury in the north to Didcot in the south of the county.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the peak number of searches took place for Oxford city centre with customers seeking “estate agents in Oxford” more often than anywhere else in the county.

Banbury provided the second highest volume of searches, followed by Henley, Didcot and Bicester in third, fourth and fifth places respectively.

Making up the top-10 in terms of search volume from position six to 10 were Abingdon, Witney, Thame, Wantage and Burford.

The estate agents sector report for Oxfordshire can be downloaded at www.indulgemedia.com/estate-agents-oxfordshire-report