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Could this be the beginning of an upturn in the UK property market?
Could this be the beginning of an upturn in the UK property market?
In a recent press release property website Rightmove.co.uk revealed that its survey of UK house prices had shown a surprising increase of 1.2% during the previous month.
The Rightmove house price survey is compiled monthly and based on the asking price of houses currently listed on its website. This sample of up to 200,000 properties accounts for over 90% of UK houses currently on the market with Estate Agents, making it the largest and most up to date sample of any house price indicator in the UK?
So just how significant is this news?
At the moment it really is too early to tell whether this will be an on-going trend or not, but what it does show is that there is increased optimism amongst those people currently selling property in the UK. If optimism is returning to the market then this could be very significant indeed.
Although a rise of 1.2% seems small it is in fact quite a substantial increase and should certainly not be disregarded. To put it into perspective, if the market rose at 1.2% each month for the next 12 months we would see an overall annual increase of 14.4%; a healthy figure by any standards.
Commenting on the figures, Miles Shipside, Commercial Director of Rightmove said: “January enquiries are 108% up on last year, setting a new Rightmove record and clearly indicating a pent up demand to move home. This ties in with over half the respondents to our Consumer Survey stating they intend to buy in 2009, in spite of 7 out of 10 of them expecting prices to fall further during the year.”
With restrictions on lending predicted to ease over the coming months (Northern Rock etc) this new optimism could just be the turning point for the relentless slide of property values.
If this is right, then history will show that the best time to invest in property for probably many years was right now.
And – the good news is – if the property market eases up, and borrowing and lending become easier, there would be an easing in the whole business world as the money flow becomes positive.
How To Listen To And Learn From The Social Web - 'How To Guide'
Article Courtesy of Philip Sheldrake, director of digital strategy at Racepoint Group.
What is the social Web?
The social Web is an umbrella term that refers to how people can socialise and interact with each other online, enabling those with shared interests, personal or professional, to coalesce. Whilst the term was coined in 1998 (according to Wikipedia), it has only recently become part of everyday language.
The social Web is powered by social media (websites designed for social activity such as blogs and the popular social networks), social augmentation of other websites (such as customer feedback and rating on Amazon), and applications and services such as Twitter apps and mobile phone widgets designed to keep you in the conversation on the move.
What is social Web analytics?
Social Web analytics (SWA) is the application of search, indexing, semantic analysis and business intelligence technologies to the task of identifying, tracking, listening to and participating in distributed conversations about a particular brand, product or issue. The emphasis is on quantifying the sentiment and influence in each conversation and tracking the trends.
Why is SWA important?
There are millions of conversations taking place online and they can be influential in terms of the impact they have on your brand. In order to engage in these conversations, you need to listen to what they are saying and respond in an appropriate way. It isn’t possible to do this manually – there is simply too much noise. SWA provides the tools to find, view and measure these conversations so that you can better understand the perceptions of your market, brands, products and services.
What are you looking for in a SWA service?
Every organisation is unique, and you will form your own precise requirements based on your market and target audience. Things to consider include:
Indexing – refers to the proportion of the World Wide Web that the service catalogues.
Indexing social networks such as MySpace and Facebook, vital to some brands, is fraught with difficulty. If one service can index and make sense of these sites more thoroughly than another, this capability may outweigh any consideration of how many millions of sites the service covers. In other words, quality may be more important than quantity. Other factors to consider include language capability, de-duplication (removal of repetitions), and perhaps most critically the ability to cope with dynamic sites ...(websites populated with content that is constantly changing).
You will need to understand how the vendor can tailor their service to your needs. If, for example, you require that specific sources are added to the indexing, this may be more readily achieved if the vendor controls their own spidering.
Spider (also known as crawler) – explores the World Wide Web and sends back appropriate data. There are robust, resilient, professional spiders, and there are amateur spiders. The former can interpret and report back on sites more effectively. They know where they've been with greater accuracy, and they revisit more frequently.
Interestingly, some SWA vendors pride themselves on having great spiders, whilst some have none at all. The latter rely on the supply of data from third parties.
Semantic analysis – the most technical aspect of SWA. To fully interpret conversations it must take into account words with more than one meaning, and the writer’s tone. For example, does the statement “Apple owners are cooler” relate to the iPod firm, or orchards? Is it to do with street credibility or temperature? You need to know whether your vendor of choice is able to interpret such statements correctly.
Sentiment, also known as tonality, is an important measure. You may find it useful to know, for example, that 60% of references to your product were positive last month, 25% were neutral and 15% were negative.
Tracking sentiment over time will help you establish whether things are going your way or not, and how exactly. But SWA vendors without semantic analysis capability cannot estimate sentiment for you. Again, this may not be a problem for your organisation depending on your specific needs. A vendor without semantic analysis capability may allow you to determine the sentiment manually for each item they discover for you, and let you log your conclusion in their system accordingly. This could be fine for a few hundred mentions a month, but if you are likely to generate thousands or tens of thousands of mentions each month, this will be time consuming and costly.
Search query structure – has a major impact on the success of the search tool. There are two extremes here, with some vendors having a mix of the two. At its simplest, the SWA service offers users the same thing as Google; a search box. A step up from this is analogous to Google’s advanced search where you can be more specific about things such as phrases, exclusions, language and dates, perfect for a quick analysis. The other end of the spectrum is the allocation of a “search manager”. This individual is expert in their company’s service, and expert at working with you to construct detailed search queries honing them regularly over time from the results that get returned.
Get going
In order to get the best results from your first foray into SWA it's important that you define and communicate your expectations clearly to the SWA vendors you invite to tender. There is considerable variation in the SWA market at the moment – from free tools to different pricing models, from the style of user interface and graphical output, from vendors who spider and those that do not. However, the better you understand this space and the clearer you can be in defining your needs, the more likely you will source the perfect SWA partner.
For a list of SWA providers and a summary of their services, and more in-depth information about social Web analytics, visit: www.socialwebanalytics.com.
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