The Move Channel

TheMoveChannel.com was founded in November 1999 by Dan Johnson. It started life as a simple guide to the buying procedures for residential property in the UK, coupled with a directory of website reviews covering property sales and rentals, again primarily in the UK.

Guides

Over the first couple of years, more guides were added, for finding, selling, letting, renting, and moving house. The in-house editorial team also wrote a range of independent guides for dozens of different financial services products, in support of various commercial affiliate relationships with different providers.

Website Directory

The website directory was also a focus of activity in the early years, with thousands of sites being systematically reviewed for inclusion across dozens of different property and personal finance categories. The database has recently been restructured to provide a framework and platform for international expansion and now lists more than 45,000 website reviews.

News

An independent news service has been a part of the site since August 2000. Every working day we keep property professionals and interested punters up to date with the property-related news, which is sent out by email to more than 18,000 subscribers and is featured not just on TheMoveChannel.com, but on more than 50 other sites where our service is syndicated.

Content

While the news service represents the backbone of the magazine element of the site, plenty of other features have been added over the years. There has been a long-running weekly piece of editorial, as well as calculators, highlighted property selections, house price monitoring, forums and TV show opportunities, many of which have also featured in our regular e-zine updates.

Property listings

Towards the end of 2003, the decision was taken to indirectly enter the international property market, by listing property from multiple agents and developers on a pay for performance basis. Following a period of development, properties from the first partner went live in April 2004.
This element of the site has rapidly become a cornerstone of the business, with partner sales climbing past the £100 million mark during the first 2 years, during which time over 600 partners have signed up, offering over 50,000 property listings in around 90 countries worldwide. A further enhancement of the property service has been the private sales solution, which allows members of the public to list their properties for sale online for a single low fee and no commission.

Investment Property

One of the key success factors has been our focus on investors and the delivery of various specialist investment property newsletters, which now go out to a combined audience of more than 25,000 subscribers. There is also a more personalised service for over 2,000 registered investors, which delivers timely alerts whenever a new investment property is added to the site that appears to be a suitable match to their investment profile.

Technology

During 2005 and 2006 there was a major investment in the technological infrastructure, database systems, staff, software and hardware, with the deployment of a range of Content Management Solutions, reporting, administration and analytical software tools. This enabled us to redesign the network for the first time in more than 5 years, both visually and in terms of usability and functionality, providing a solid technological base for ongoing expansion.

Growth

Throughout 2006, the focus was on accelerating the growth of the partner database, increasing the volume of the property listing database. This has been achieved through increased marketing expenditure (allowing us to feature at a large number of property exhibitions), rollout of our network of country-specific sites, increasing the size of the sales force and through distribution of our property database to a growing network of key websites, including fish4homes, Home.co.uk, Property Abroad and Homes Overseas.

Quality

Size isn’t everything and usability is an important issue for any property listings service. We have a wide range of data management tools to remove duplicate listings, reduce dead images and provide a standard structure for location information, which will ultimately allow us to integrate a worldwide mapping service.

The Future...

TheMoveChannel.com is currently developing the “TMC Suite”, a set of online software tools on the Microsoft platform that are aimed at estate agents around the world who wish to improve their website offerings through the integration of property listings database management, enquiry handling, tracking, reporting, client contact management, sales reporting and email marketing solutions within a single web-based software system. The product will be ready for launch in 2007.
We also have plans for multi-language listings, a mobile version of the site, an increase in UK-focused activity, the introduction of video elements to the site, user-driven content, site personalisation tools and lots more beside...

Our Location

Our office (shown with the red marker labelled with the number 1 on the image below) is a stone's throw from Tower Bridge and around 10 - 15 minutes walk along the river from London Bridge Tube and mainline rail stage (shown with marker 2), Tower Hill Underground station (marker 3) and Tower Gateway Docklands Light Railway station (marker 4).



Company information

TheMoveChannel.com is operated by On The Move Ltd, a licensed credit broker based in London, England.

On The Move Ltd is limited company registered in England no. 3871784

Registered for VAT No: 805 3650 46

Registered with the Office Of Fair Trading - Consumer Credit Licence (CCL) No: 516350

Registered for Data Protection - Registration number Z4966058

Office address: 45 Lafone Street, Shad Thames, London, SE1 2LX

Go to the site: www.themovechannel.com