Entegral voices real estate industry concerns at the Online Intermediation Platforms Market Inquiry (OIPMI)

In February this year, the Competition Commission of South Africa launched its “Online Intermediation Platforms Market Inquiry (OIPMI)”. The Commission published a draft for public comment outlining its plan to investigate these markets and stating that “the Commission has reason to believe that there exist market features which impede, distort or restrict competition amongst the platforms themselves, and which undermine the purposes of the [Competition] Act.”






While it encompasses companies like Takealot, Uber Eats, and Airbnb, it also started an investigation into property portals and listing syndication providers. Which caught the attention of Entegral as we know that:


  • High portal prices are a big problem for many of our real estate clients. Are they justified, and do they deliver value for agents?
  • Some platform market features hinder fair competition between portals, service providers, and innovative new real estate models;
  • Competition amongst platforms is fierce, and there is a focus on holding on to the listing data at all costs, which we believe is not ideal for consumers and doesn't promote a level playing field.  There are also barriers of entry for smaller agencies and portals to enter the industry;
  • There is a lack of transparency in the real estate industry, which results in smaller agencies inadvertently funding larger competitors via their support for portals and bond originators. We also see a huge problem with exclusive partnerships between portals and industry organisations.


The past week arguably presented one of the best opportunities for the real estate industry to voice its concerns and engage with the Commission and portals within a transparent, public forum. Entegral started engaging with the Competition Commission earlier this year, did some research, talked to clients, presented our views, had meetings, and last week also participated in the public hearings as the only service provider, and notably the only self-funded real estate service provider. You can view the recordings here:


As noted by Entegral CEO, Adriaan Grové, we are looking forward to further participating and contributing, to ensure more people are empowered in the real estate ecosystem. 



Subscribe to our Entegral Insider Newsletter for more insights to follow on this or The Real Deal blog, where we share personal insights.



Popular posts from this blog

Easily link Base with external CRM systems

Image
What is the Base Zapier integration? The Entegral Base system was recently improved with a native Zapier app integration . This allows estate agents to exchange data and create automated workflows with over 2000+ popular apps, including all the leading CRM specific apps.  Why even link a CRM system? Although Base has contact management, contact categories, automatic lead import, and other great CRM features , users sometimes require very specific CRM functions that we don't (yet) cater to. With our Zapier integration , we allow agents to link any popular app with Base. Once linked with your app, you can for instance automatically synchronise your contacts from Base to the external app or vice versa.  The added benefit is that you can create automated workflows and link more apps (e.g. insert contact details into a Mailchimp drip email campaign  and ZOHO CRM at the same time). This makes the Zapier fee irreverent compared to the derived benefits.  Automated portal lead import from
Read more

Property24 acquires Private Property, what do estate agents think?

Image
Property24.com, South Africa’s largest property portal owned by Naspers, has bought rival Private Property . The deal is likely to come under the close scrutiny of competition authorities as it involves the two biggest property portals in the country. Due to the impact of such an acquisition on the industry, Entegral was interested to find out what the perceived advantages and disadvantages of such a deal would be, both through the eyes of the consumer and the estate agent.   Here are the results from around 250 responses received on a survey done over a 2 day period , mostly from agents and agency owners. While the survey presents a small portion of the market (a ccording to the EAAB's latest annual report there are 19,424 registered agents and agency owners, excluding intern estate agents, in South Africa) , f eedback has been received from well-respected agency owners and agents, and we believe this gives a good indication of the current view of agents. The fear from estate
Read more

US trends show more buyers come from internet, less from print

Image
Where home buyers found the home they purchased- 2001 vs. 2008   Have a look at the very interesting figures published for USA home buyers on: http://rismedia.com/2009-03-29/buyers-becoming-more-successful-finding-homes-through-internet/   The NAR statistics show that 7 years on from 2001, 32% of home buyers found their home through the internet. What’s even more interesting is that print newspaper hardly makes an impact, a mere 3% of buyers found their home through print.  
Read more