Property Bee
Written by James on September 14th, 2008 in General.
A few weeks ago I came across a plugin for Mozilla Firefox called Property Bee. For those of you who haven’t heard of it I will try and explain what it is and how it works.
Property Bee is a small plugin which works in the Firefox internet browser to track house prices (a huge talking point in the UK at the moment). Using the Rightmove website it keeps track of any changes that an Estate agents makes to a listing. For example if an estate agent changes a price and you view the listing again, it will record that listing and store it in a database. Sounds pretty simple doesn’t it?
Well, the clever part comes from the title of the plugin - ‘Bee’. When you install the plugin and then register you come a ‘Bee’. When working with other Bees you send your findings on the website to a server which holds all the changes to the listing on Rightmove. When you next do a search on Rightmove for an area or a property it will download all the changes in between meaning you get an in depth record of price changes!
Although I have only been using it a few weeks, because I am working as a ‘Bee’ I have been collecting other peoples data. Therefore some of the properties I have been looking at on Rightmove show huge drops in price! The average price drop around here (Oxfordshire & Berkshire area) seems to be between 10-20%!
A lot of the properties have been on the market for 6+ months (yes Property Bee tells you how long it’s been on the market too)! It’s all quite exciting really as I am looking to buy somewhere in the near future but at the moment I am saving so much money by holding back as the prices just keep dropping. Property Bee even tracks rental prices and they have been dropping in the area too.
I think we are in for an interesting 12 months!