12^th November, 2009 – estatecreate won The innovation Award last night at an awards ceremony organised by The Negotiator magazine in association with The Digital Property Group.

Henry Yates, estatecreate Chief Executive, said: “I am very pleased that the team’s hard work has been recognised by winning another award. The judges were unanimous in voting for estatecreate, which is a great vote of confidence in our product.”

Mark Milner, The Digital Property Group’s (Primelocation.com, FindaProperty.com, Homesandproperty.co.uk and FindaNewHome.com) Chief Executive said: “The success of the Negotiator Awards is a testament to on-going excellence within the market, with firms such as estatecreate gaining much deserved recognition. It’s a pleasure to celebrate their achievements as well as toast the impressive performance of the estate agency industry in challenging times.”

estatecreate is a new tool for estate agents to showcase a vendor’s home with a standalone website for their property with its own domain name – the 21st century glossy property brochure for the web. You can see an example website here: http://dovehousestreetsw3.com/

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The service is very easy to use – estatecreate takes a feed of data from each branch and the agent can then easily add content and publish to a domain name of their choice. You can see a product demo here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIGk-9Bxp4Q

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The judges of the 2009 Awards read like a Who’s Who of Estate Agency. They included:

Peter Bolton King, CEO, National Association of Estate Agents

Paul Broadhead, Head of Policy, Building Societies Association

Nicholas Leeming, Corporate Client Director, Property Finder

Mr Bill McClintock, Chief Operating Officer, The Property Ombudsman Service

Julian O’Dell, Founder, TM Training & Development

Ian Floyed, Chief Executive, My Home Move

Peter Rollings, Managing Director, Marsh & Parsons

Mr Ken Waller, Former Chief Executive of Connells Residential

Lucy Morton, Managing Partner, WA Ellis

John McGrath, Chief Executive Officer, McGrath Estate Agents

James Howard, Associate Director – Development, Urban Splash

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estatecreate was founded by Henry Yates and is the first company to offer this service to estate agents in the UK. Yates is an experienced entrepreneur who has previously co-founded and sold two businesses, Face, the research and planning agency (www.facegroup.co.uk, sold to Cello PLC) and Univillage.com, the social network for students (sold to www.sub.tv).

estatecreate has announced a new partnership with The Live Organisation, the UK’s leading provider of residential conveyancing, with the launch of Live Sitemaker software which allows agents to create individual websites for their properties.

Tim Price, group sales & marketing director at The Live Organisation said:  “We are constantly looking for ways to give clients the tools to sell properties to customers in the most efficient and user friendly way. Sitemaker provides a contemporary and comprehensive marketing tool which goes well beyond a simple listing.”

“Winning instructions is the life blood of any agent and Sitemaker allows Live agents the opportunity to enhance their portfolio of marketing services, especially for middle and up market properties. And it is exactly this type of sophisticated improvement which can help agents win more business.”

Henry Yates, CEO estatecreate, said “We are excited to be working with The Live Organisation, they have a fantastic client base that will really benefit from using the Live SiteMaker service.”

The Live Sitemaker software allows clients to create an individual website for each property and a personal domain name. The format is easy to read and understand, allowing customers to view the property information with no confusion. Clients have more online space to include information about the local area, schools and contact details, as well as substantial room for photographs.

The easy to use software only takes minutes to create and publish websites. Clients can share the personal property websites through social networks and get more leads from other agents. The personal domain name is more memorable, making it more effective for advertising purposes. The websites can be branded for users, making them more visually appealing. There is no duplicated entries as the software auto-populates the sites for you.

Tim Price added: “Individual property websites are innovative and functional.

We offer estate agents the easiest and most cost effective way to create standalone websites for individual properties. The sites have their own web address and unlimited pages to showcase photos, floorplans, 360 tours and walk throughs.”

More details of Live’s new service can be found at www.live-sitemaker.com.

4th FEBRUARY, 2010 – estatecreate has launched a new service for estate agents that will drive more web traffic to their properties from search engines.

Search Engines such as Google are putting more and more emphasis on website content and domain names. By using estatecreate websites to showcase properties on key street names in an agency’s neighbourhood, agents will increase their search traffic and drive more leads to their properties.

Henry Yates, estatecreate Chief Executive, said “Search engine optimisation (SEO) is one of the most cost-effective marketing tools available to estate agents. By investing in SEO you should see increased traffic and increased business for years to come. Our SEO solution is part of the overall package estate agents buy into when they sign up to estatecreate.”

The service is very easy to set up. First an agent needs to identify key roads where they sell houses in their neighbourhood.

The agent then sets up estatecreate sites for the key addresses around the agent’s branch. These sites will all point back to the estate agent’s website. Whenever the agent has a property for sale on a key road, they showcase it on the appropriate website. You can see an example website here: http://dovehousestreetsw3.com/

estatecreate is a new tool for estate agents to showcase a vendor’s home with a standalone website for their property with its own domain name. The service is very easy to use – estatecreate takes a feed of data from each branch and the agent can then easily add content and publish to a domain name of their choice.

The service is the holder of The Negotiator’s Innovation Award and the Web Marketing Association’s WebAward.

estatecreate was founded by Henry Yates and is the first company to offer this service to estate agents in the UK. Yates is an experienced entrepreneur who has previously co-founded and sold two businesses, Face, the research and planning agency (www.facegroup.co.uk, sold to Cello PLC) and Univillage.com, the social network for students (sold to www.sub.tv).

The Estate Agent

Originally uploaded by henry_yates

The Estate Agent interviewed estatecreate in their April issue. Unfortunately it is print only, so here is a screenshot.

Please give us your feedback as we will continually be trying to improve our core service as well as introducing new features.

Some of the new features in the pipeline include:

- more feed partners. Let us know which property portals you would like added;

- an extension of the wizard which helps you complete all the steps to building a site;

- automated AdWords. We will automate the set up, including selecting key words. All you have to do is choose a budget and sign off the wording;

Let us know which features you want. The more requests we get for a feature the higher up the list it will go.

I have just tried out Google’s new social bar (you can read their blog post about it here). It allows you to easily integrate Google Friend Connect into your website, so that users can login using either their Google, Yahoo, AIM or OpenID account, comment and have conversations about content on your site.

You can try it out on this site: http://www.ossamples.com/socialmussie/

It looks very easy to implement, so expect to see it on estatecreate.com soon.

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The initial release focuses on the free property website creator. We have tried to design it with simplicity in mind, to allow you to easily add photos, descriptions and maps and choose your own design, creating a free website for your property in about 5 minutes. We will be adding video in a few weeks time.

We would love your feedback so that we can improve the product. I would be very grateful if you could drop me an email with any comments or suggestions to henry@estatecreate.com.

Image via Wikipedia

Today we ventured out of our lair for the first time to give the first ever demonstration of estatecreate.com. The venue was a packed OpenCoffee session on 5th Floor of Waterstones, Piccadilly. The Seedcamp team were out in force, including Saul Klein and Reshma Sohoni, as this year’s application process is now open.

We set up our makeshift signage and then spent the next two hours demoing our product to other entrepreneurs and investors.

We received some great feedback and even a few customers. The general consensus was that they liked the free website builder for property and thought the product had legs. There were some great usability comments (particularly from the experts at Clearleft) thank you for those, we are now working on some improvements.

We are aiming to have our private beta out in a week or so. If you would like to be one of the first people to use the site register your email address here: estatecreate.com.