Property on eBay

Singapore's largest property portal, propertyguru.com.sg, has announced a partnership with eBay, which sees the launch of a new property search service on eBay's Singapore website, ebay.propertyguru.com.sg

The new eBay Singapore real estate service offers consumers the ability to find and review available apartments/condo, landed house and commercial property for rent and sale in Singapore and overseas - with photos, videos and maps. It also gives users access to free expert mortgage advice from accredited independent mortgage consultants, as well as enabling them to find real estate agents by property speciality and read property and investment research, guides, articles and news.

In a press release from propertyguru.com.sg about the partnership, Allis Ghim, Director at eBay said:

"This is great news for the Singapore real estate community. Our partnership with PropertyGuru enables us to offer our users the best experience by partnering with the experts in online real estate, and offer a new content-rich real estate service. This represents a great stride in eBay's strategy to provide the best experience to our users".

eBay Singapore teaming up with propertyguru.com.sg is not the only news from eBay about property listings of late.

In the UK, with nearly 20 million unique visitors each month, ebay.co.uk is UK's the fourth largest website, it also lists residential property, currently with more than 180,000 listings from the UK and overseas are included in ebay.co.uk's residential property category. Properties can be listed in the auction and "buy it now" categories, or as a "classified ad only", which cannot be bid on.

Worldwide, eBay has over 86 million users. So, what is the online auctions giant doing globally with property listings, and how does propertyguru.com.sg's partnership with eBay as well as the new listings on ebay.co.uk compare to those on the equally popular eBay domains in other countries?

The Australian domain ebay.com.au and its US counterpart ebay.com also list properties in their real estate sections. Sellers can list properties for auction, as "buy it now" items or as classified ads.

At the moment, ebay.com.au has far fewer private real estate listings than ebay.co.uk, with only 113 items in its real estate category. ebay.com has attracted a few more sellers, with 2993 items in its real estate section.

Along with private property listings, ebay.com.au also has a content distribution partnership with domain.com.au, Australia's number two property portal. These listings are included in the ebay.domain.com.au site, which is linked to from the ebay.com.au front page.

ebay.co.uk charges GBP£35 per real estate listing, as compared to a fee of AUD$49.95 on ebay.com.au. ebay.com offers various types of listings for prices ranging from USD$35 to USD$300.

Ireland's eBay domain, ebay.ie, recently created a partnership with Ireland's top property portal, daft.ie. ebay.daft.ie is linked to from the ebay.ie front page.

French eBay domain ebay.fr has 12 million registered users and also links to a dedicated "no bids" classifieds listing real estate search page (with 14 day free trials for advertisers). eBay immo, as it's called, launched last October and is modelled on the successful Italian eBay real estate website: eBay case. And over 132,000 properties listings are also available via a categories search on the German ebay.de.

This is just a small sample of what is happening in the 39 markets eBay operates in, and partnering with portals is just one way eBay is moving in on property listings.