Singapore, 16th July 2009
The results of the CNBC International Property Awards 2009 have been announced and www.house2house.pk has won the "Best Property Portal Pakistan" award, beating entrants from over 25 countries, more than 4000 candidates and some of the best property professionals, decided by astute committee consisting of 52 Judges. The announcements were made at an awards ceremony held at Marina Mandarin hotel in Singapore on 16th July.
"We are delighted, thrilled and motivated; To reach this milestone in less than 14-months is a great achievement. house2house.pk has proven its domination and authority in the online property world by winning this award. I would like to congratulate and thank everyone for their continued support, hard work and dedication in achieving this success and recognition".
CNBC Awards Certificate
The event is part of the International Property Awards, an annual competition dedicated to finding the best real estate professionals across the globe. Hundreds of residential and commercial property-related firms from over 56 countries in Asia, Europe and Americas were evaluated by a senior panel of real estate and Internet experts chaired by Eric Pickles, chairman of the UK´s Conservative Party.
This year´s judges included Ben Wood, industry head property markets of Google UK; Peter Bolton King, group chief executive of the National Federation of Property Professionals; Imtiaz Farookhi, chief executive of the National House Building Council; Christopher Hall, president elect of FIABCI; Wilhelm Harnish, Master Builders of Australia (MBA); Thijis Stoffer, International Consortium of Real Estate Agents Association (ICREA); Helen Shield, editor-in-chief of International Homes magazine and Gillian Farr, head of design of Laura Ashley Home.
One of our key success factors that we achieved is our focus on Real estate Agents and Property Developers. We are fully dedicated to both sectors in delivering a very high quality service in helping them generate hundreds of thousands of quality leads. There is also a more personalised service for registered investors, which allow us to deliver timely alerts whenever a new investment property is added to the site that appears to be a suitable match to their investment profile. More importantly, It´s a wonderful tool for overseas Pakistanis to buy, sell and rent properties in Pakistan. Currently more than 40% of overseas Pakistanis visit this site regularly. Breaking into this niche market of over 5-million means hundreds and thousands of quality leads for any business or organisation.
With nearly 1.89 million hits and over 400,000 page views with the help of almost 40,000 unique visitors per month, house2ouse.pk is the perfect market solution for anyone looking for better visibility, branding and wider exposure.
We have invested heavily in the technological infrastructure, database systems, staff, software and hardware, with the help of a range of content management solutions, reporting, administration and analytical software tools. This enabled us to provide a network, both visually and in terms of usability and functionality, providing a solid base for ongoing expansion. We have plans for multi-language listings, a mobile version of the site, an increase in Pak-Focused activity, the introduction of a video element of the site, user driven contents, site personalisation tools and lots more beside!
While the news service represents the backbone of the magazine element of the site, plenty of other features will be added over the years. There will be weekly piece of editorial, as well as calculators, highlighted property selections, house price monitoring, forums and TV show opportunities, many of which will be featured in regular e-zone updates and in our H2Hmagazine.
Throughout 2009, the focus would be to accelerate the growth of the database, increasing the volume of the property-listing database. This will be achieved through increased marketing expenditure (allowing us to feature at a large number of property exhibitions), rollout of our network of property related- sites, increasing the size of the sales force and through distribution of our property database to a growing network of key websites.
My special thanks go to Mr Nasir Hamid who has worked really hard in the success of the magazine and the website. I also thank Des Stevenson for introducing a variety of marketing techniques to help us achieve our objective. Creative Director Abid Manzoor, Senior Web Developer Mohammad Ilyas, Technician Haroon Kiani, Senior Admin Monika Kasika and the whole H2H team is worthy of praise for their dedication and hard work in achieving this recognition. More importantly I am really grateful to the dedicated visitors of the site that made this possible.
house2house.pk is currently developing the "TMC Suite", a set of online software tools on the Microsoft platform that are aimed at estate agents around the country 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 2010.
Nasim Malik
nasim@house2house.pk |
