The Fubra Blog
A House Price Crash could be very close
When we bought the web’s most popular house price discussion site HousePriceCrash.co.uk last year traffic was high and we expected it to get higher as we approached the point where a correction in house prices became completely inevitable.
We put a lot of effort into a redesign of the site and subscriptions have soared since then. But the most impressive growth has been in the traffic to the site. It now stands at over 20,000 visitors a day which is over double last year’s traffic numbers.
We expect this traffic trend to continue as the correction in house prices starts to gather momentum throughout 2008. While this is happening we aim build on the sites position as the ultimate information resource on the latest developments in the market by adding more tools and features.
One such feature we have added recently is to change the home page graph from a static image to a dynamically generated one that we think is just as good looking. It’s a great addition because we now have the very latest graphing on the front page all the time and there is much more to come.
We hope you enjoy the site and look forward to joining you in buying a cheaper property in a few years time.
OurProperty gets 5th Hitwise top 10 award
I got a mail from Hitwise today letting us know that we have got our 5th top 10 award based on the amount of UK traffic that our site OurProperty.co.uk gets.
That’s great news in a way as it means we are the 7th most visited property site on the internet here is what the top 7 looks like now:
1. Rightmove.co.uk – Rightmove plc
2. Vebra.com – Guardian
3. Primelocation.com – DMGT
4. Findaproperty.co.uk – DMGT
5. PropertyFinder.com – News International
6. Homesonview.com – Core Systems
7. OurProperty.co.uk – Fubra
The bad news is that we were number 7 in the previous quarter as well so this is the first quarter that we haven’t improved our position by one place since we started winning the award.
The main reason for this is that we have been a bit slow in developing new features for the web site because we have had to deal with an office move and developing better back end systems to cope with our next level of growth which takes a while but should be well worth the wait.
The good news is that most of that is now done so with a following wind and a bit of luck I expect to see us rising to 2nd position this year and hopefully taking the top spot some time in 2008.
The Queen owns the lot!
With our new property web site we have ended up doing a lot of research into everything to do with land and property. A lot of it is stuff that I knew a bit about already but the most surprising thing that I have found out so far was a legal quirk that most people probably don’t know about or give much thought to.
The fact comes from an idea which dates right back to the Norman conquest in 1066 but it is still effective today. It is that the monarch is the only person in England and Wales who is capable of owning land. Everyone else who thinks they might only land only owns a set of rights and duties to the Crown.
That is where the term freehold comes from a freeholder is said to ‘hold the land’ for the Crown and in exchange they are normally fairly free to do what they want on the land.
If you are concerned that you might have some obligations to the Crown as part of your freehold title that you don’t know about then your local land registry office might be able to check for you or alternatively you could examine your deeds.