Top people’s letting agents in upmarket London neighbourhoods are launching a luxury property portal.Fabricproperty.com is owned and managed by a group of letting agents and estate agents.
The site is looking to sit in a niche as the luxury residential rental and sales portal for London by offering quality properties and unique content , including neighbourhood tours and celebrity interviews.
“Many property portals have ramped up their charges recently but fabricproperty.com is not operated by media owners – the agents themselves run it and they are the shareholders,” said Simon Hobbs, managing director of Forward, the company behind the portal.
The site lists luxury property from well-to-do neighbourhoods from north, west and central London.
The site features TV quality video tours of properties.
“This is much more than the average property video, these are TV-quality, and capture the true size and beauty of the property, as though users are seeing the home for the first time with the agent,” said Hobbs.
“We believe fabric is a unique concept. Because we have access to some of the finest properties in the country, the buzz surrounding the launch has been incredible.”
Many of London’s leading property rental agencies have signed up to the site.
Fabric follows in the footsteps of another agent-owned national web portal, radarhomes.co.uk, which launched in October last year.
The idea was to give letting agents more control over the finances, content and direction of a web site that carried their listings.
Radar is still online – but has a profile much lower than that of headlining competitors like the Rightmove and Zoopla.
Taking the middle ground is Property Live – owned by the Association of Residential Letting Agents (ARLA) and the National Association of Estate Agents (NAEA) hailed as an opportunity for agents to take on the independently owned portals at their own game.
The lesson from all these sites is probably ownership and control does not matter as much as the depth of the pockets paying out for the marketing budgets.
The sites that advertise the most , with Rightmove and Zoopla shelling out for expensive TV campaigns this month, are those that get the most traffic and rent most homes.


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