A municipal real estate portal
Location marketing, citizen service and urban development instrument
What is KIP?
With KIP | The municipal real estate platform, municipalities and business development agencies can create their own locally or regionally focused real estate marketplace. They can offer their own real estate professionally in the portal and also open it for private and commercial providers to advertise. The real estate portal can either be directly integrated into your own homepage or operated as an external portal on kip.net.
The product contains an extensive marketing package that can be used to draw attention to the portal on site.
KIP | The municipal real estate platform has been tried and tested many times and is already used as standard software by around 500 municipalities, districts and economic regions. The product meets all the requirements of a modern, contemporary real estate exchange and can be used “out-of-the-box” within a very short time.
The use of a municipal real estate portal makes sense for municipalities that are struggling with vacancies, empty buildings or moving away. See our video (currently only available in German) below:
Why municipalities or rural districts should operate their own real estate portals
Revitalization of the local real estate market and
External presentation of your own municipality or region
While there is a great shortage of housing in metropolitan regions, rural regions are struggling with the decay of buildings and the vacancy of numerous properties. In both situations, it is advisable to introduce your own local real estate exchange. This gives citizens and local real estate agents the opportunity to pass on their offers specifically to searchers from the region. At the same time, municipalities can present their own offers in a modern and up-to-date way and benefit from the advantages of publication on a portal compared to publication on their own homepage.
Also for the promotion of the internal development the enterprise of a real estate stock exchange is meaningful. Owners who have opted for the provision of potential indoor areas are thus given the direct opportunity to place the offer on the market.
In addition, the professional presentation of the local residential and commercial properties has an effect on the public image of the location. Potential new residents, companies willing to relocate or potential returnees are presented with the available offer at a glance. Active location marketing is carried out with the help of the portal.
Information for searchers and offerers
On the following pages we have put together a list of the advantages of a municipal real estate portal for searchers and providers of real estate:
- Information for property seekers
- Information for real estate providers
Advertising in the usual real estate portals is not an option
The costs for switching an individual real estate announcement for 4 weeks are with the large real estate portals partial with clearly over 300, – €. For municipalities this means incalculable costs, for owners in rural regions, whose objects are not marketed partly over a period of many months or even years, these amounts are not to be stemmed. Especially if the value of your own property is not very high. At the same time, the partially listed companies that operate the major real estate portals in Germany work with the collected data. The storage location of personal data and the handling of property enquiries is also uncertain. In addition, many portals sell the data of owners who want to sell a property privately to real estate agents with the highest bid.
Local authorities should therefore refrain from placing advertisements in the major real estate portals and not recommend this to their citizens. It is much more meaningful to open its own real estate stock exchange.
SECURITY AND PRIVACY
USABILITY AND ATTRACTIVENESS
SEARCH ENGINES-
OPTIMIZATION
INTERFACES AND
SCALABILITY
Requirements for a municipal real estate portal
A real estate portal, which is operated by a municipality, a district or an economic region, always has a regional reference, but should nevertheless receive the attention of those interested in real estate and companies willing to settle on a supra-regional level.
When developing such a portal it is important to consider numerous factors. In addition to the (data) security requirements resulting from the new EU data protection regulation, it is particularly important to pay attention to the technical implementation with regard to usability, search engine findability, performance, scalability and user attractiveness. As with all web projects, one should be aware that the main effort does not result from the programming of such a portal, but from the operation, maintenance and promotion of the platform.
The individual factors are again emphasized in the following. In conclusion, it can already be said that it makes sense and saves costs to rely on an existing system such as KIP | The municipal real estate platform and not to invest any money in the new development and operation of your own real estate portals.
Security and data protection requirements
The operators of websites are subject to high demands – mainly due to the basic data protection regulation. These are partly reflected in the requirements regarding search engine optimization. For example, a real estate portal must have an SSL certificate, as contact forms are provided for the automated processing of personal data. This also directly implies a transparent data protection declaration and the inclusion of the processes in the directory of processing activities. An essential component is also the security of the server used and the software used.
Requirements regarding usability and attractiveness for the user
The success of a real estate portal depends above all on a high level of user acceptance. This is reflected in a high retention period on the pages, but above all in the generation of inquiries on the offers posted. For this it is important both to present a current and as extensive a real estate offer as possible on the portal, and to pay attention to a purposeful user guidance, low loading times, optimized sides for mobile devices and advertising freedom. An extensive offer includes the fact that real estates are to be found by the local administration as well as by private persons and local real estate brokers. The topicality of the offers also plays an important role for user satisfaction.
Requirements regarding search engine optimization
Over 70 percent of all real estate searchers start their search on Google by entering the real estate category in conjunction with a location. A real estate portal should therefore have an optimal structure for Google to be listed in the search results on page 1. Since Google in Germany in the range of the search machines has a market share of approximately 97 per cent, a focusing on action recommendations of Google is meaningful for Web master. Most substantial points of the search machine optimization of a real estate portal are:
- low loading times
- “Speaking URLs”
- logical page structure and useful internal links
- unique contents
- responsivity
- External linking of the portal
Requirements regarding interfaces and scalability
The operation of a real estate portal also requires the provision of interfaces. At the same time, the system should be kept open so that it can react to future market developments and can be supplemented with new requirements. It must be ensured that local real estate agents can also publish offers in the portal. As a rule, they do not publish their offers manually in a portal, but transfer their properties via OpenImmo interface from their broker software to the portals. This interface should therefore be supported in any case. An interface to integrate offers from the portal on other external websites should also be considered.
Standardized solution thanks to KIP
With the product KIP | The municipal real estate platform, municipalities, districts and economic regions have at their disposal a fully developed and tried and tested instrument for professionally operating a local real estate exchange. The requirements described have been implemented accordingly. What KIP | The municipal real estate platform offers you can read below.
Would you like to find out more about the requirements for operating a municipal real estate exchange? We will be happy to provide you with a comprehensive checklist on request. You can find our contact details here.
Creating your own real estate marketplace with KIP
What can KIP do? The municipal real estate platform?
With KIP you can build your own locally or regionally focused real estate marketplace. As an operator, you can publish real estate offers or building gaps and new development areas there. In addition, you can optionally open the platform for citizens and/or local real estate agents to advertise.
You can either integrate the real estate portal directly into your own website via a JavaScript API, adapting it to your corporate identity, or operate it on www.kip.net
With the launch of the portal, you will receive a comprehensive marketing package from us with which you can draw attention to your portal on site.
KIP | The municipal real estate platform has been tried and tested many times and is already used by around 500 municipalities, districts and economic regions. The product meets all the requirements of a modern, contemporary real estate exchange and can be used out-of-the-box within the shortest possible time. It offers the necessary scalability and expandability through other modules for digital urban development.
- advertise your own real estate offers
- Enable citizens to post offers
- actively marketing locations
- individualize with your own image and text material
- Revitalize the local real estate market
Talking to KIP:
Bo Nintzel and Jörg Lennardt discuss the advantages of KIP for business development agencies and municipalities.
Detailed information by customer group:
INFORMATION FOR MUNICIPALITIES
Launch a real estate portal as a municipality
Find out what advantages your municipality has if you use a local real estate exchange with KIP | The municipal real estate platform, on which you can publish your own municipal offers.
INFORMATION FOR COUNTIES
KIP as a tool for your district wide location marketing
Find out what advantages you have when you as a district use a real estate portal as a tool for your location marketing and as support for your municipalities.
INFORMATION FOR REGIONS
KIP as real estate portal for economic regions
If you would like to introduce KIP as a region, we have put together some information here to help you make your decision.
KIP IN ACTION
Where KIP is already used successfully
See for yourself how other municipalities, districts and economic regions use KIP.
This will give you an idea of what your individual KIP could look like.
VOICES
What users say about KIP
Trust the judgement of other KIP users and convince yourself that the use of KIP pays off.
AT A GLANCE
Your questions about KIP | The municipal real estate platform
What is the difference between KIP and other commercial platforms?
With KIP, municipalities, counties or economic regions operate their own regional real estate portal.
The platform thus serves to present the local supply of apartments, houses, land and commercial real estate for sale or rent and thus best reflects the local real estate market.
In contrast to commercial portals, where the main benefit for the operators lies in the marketing of user data, KIP serves the municipalities as a tool for internal development in order to actively combat vacancies. In addition, the portal is kept free of advertising.
KIP is very attractive for municipalities that have their own marketing offers. You only pay a manageable annual fee and can not only place unlimited own offers for it, but also present your location at the same time and offer a unique citizen service.
Which offers can be published in KIP and what is the procedure?
In the KIP, the municipality can advertise real estate. It is possible to advertise all types of real estate either for purchase, rent or lease. Also private persons and commercial offerers can receive an account and advertise by broker software or manually objects for living or for commercial use.
A real estate, which is advertised, must be seized thereby with its situation information. This includes at least the location in which the property is located. This automatically assigns it to the corresponding KIP at the local, district and regional level. Additionally the real estate is published in the portal wunschimmo.de – properties also on bauplatz.de. Thus the object obtains a high range, without one must make a multiple maintenance of the data.
Our municipality publishes its own real estate offers on the municipal homepage so far. Isn’t that better than via KIP?
In order to sell or rent properties successfully, it makes sense to achieve the highest possible reach with your offer. Normally, you do not achieve this through your own website or through newspaper ads. For 90% of real estate seekers today the Internet is the most important source for real estate search – for most the entry is the search engine Google. It is therefore important to be found there on the first page. Usually the first positions are occupied by the large real estate exchanges, on which you must advertise your offers expensively and which have only a limited running time of few weeks. KIP offers you the opportunity to go online with your own modern platform and to take advantage of several advantages by
- advertise your own offers professionally;
- achieve a high reach for your real estate advertisements;
- Advertise your spaces and objects in a contemporary manner and optimally displayed on all terminals;
- all relevant data, such as information from the Energy Performance Certificate, can be stored in a legally secure manner;
- offer properties in the bidding process, for example;
- You can also integrate your offers directly into the municipal website using our JavaScript API;
- strengthen local real estate professionals and
- operate a valuable tool to counteract urban vacancies.
