3rd February 2011
Property investors set to benefit from pioneering property review and analysis website rankdesk.com
rankdesk (www.rankdesk.com) is a unique new property review and analysis website aimed at those investing in the central London property market. It provides on-demand reports to investors who want an independent analysis of a central London property, and publishes the industry’s first weekly ‘rankings’ which highlight the top performing quality and investment properties submitted by a growing number of London estate agents.
rankdesk was established following the simple observation that residential property lacks the necessary in-depth investment data required by today’s investor. With rankdesk, an investor can obtain data such as net yields, expenses and even filter for refurbishment opportunities, at the click of a button.
At the heart of rankdesk’s platform is the RQI (residential quality and investment) ranking method, which is based on British housing quality standards and up to date investor sentiment. In order to provide its reviews, the company’s analysts grade and rank properties from estate agents’ details using the RQI method which incorporate dozens of criteria such as proximity to transport, cash flow, net yield and minimum space standards. This methodology is reviewed by an advisory board of leading academics and industry experts.
Savvas Verdis, CEO and Founder of rankdesk, comments: “There are a number of very successful property portals in the US and Australia providing automated investment data aimed at the investor market. We are different in two unique ways: Each property assessment relies on a comprehensive desktop analysis, where we manually review each floor plan and assign individual rents based on comparable properties on the same street. Secondly, we put equal emphasis on the quality of the property and test a variety of parameters such as floor space, storage space and neighbourhood amenities.”
Rankdesk is currently in BETA development and is free to register, although it has started charging for its on-demand analysis service, which allows investors to send a web link of a property and receive a five page analysis report within 24 hours. In the future, the site will work on a similar pricing model to product review websites such as ‘Which?’ where users pay a small fee to access the weekly reviews and rankings.
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Richard Bell, a property investor who has been using the site, comments: “It usually takes me hours to gather the information required when reviewing a prospective property and its investment potential, and not living in London, I can’t always rely on local knowledge nor just pop in to confirm a local area. I find rankdesk extremely useful because it has everything I need in one place, is straightforward to navigate and great value considering the time it saves me. As it develops, I can see it being an intrinsic tool for London property investors.”
Several estate agents have signed up to rankdesk, including Douglas & Gordon, Marsh & Parsons, Sandfords and Kay & Co.
Ed Mead, of Douglas & Gordon, comments: “rankdesk will be an extremely useful tool for property investors, particularly those based overseas, and it will only improve over time. It offers analysis based on comprehensive detail and clever methodology – there’s simply nothing else like it, so we are delighted to be involved.”
For further information or to register for free, please visit http://www.rankdesk.com, or contact rankdesk on Tel: 08453 118 115 / email: info@rankdesk.com.
Editors notes:
Rankdesk is a trading name of Property Analytics Ltd. Seed funding for Rankdesk was provided by London Executive Ltd, a property wealth management firm, which manages the residential assets of international investors in the prime central London area. Rankdesk was created by Savvas Verdis, who is also a Fellow at the London School of Economics where he teaches graduate courses in urban planning and economic development. Savvas received a PhD in architecture at Cambridge University and is a member of the Institute of Economic development.
Press contact
For further press information and images, please contact Emma Ward Hunt at Foundation PR Ltd on Tel: (0)20 8542 7400 or email: emma.wardhunt@foundation-pr.co.uk
How scalable is Rankdesk?
Investors often ask us how scalable our business model is and if we have got plans to open further ranking desks in other cities. The short honest answer is that we are ‘relatively scalable’!
This is often surprising , for a company that bases most of its day to day work analysing properties remotely (click here for our blog entry on the remote analysis of properties and the HITs model). Surely, we are told, you can start analysing properties in Shanghai, Melbourne & Toronto and provide global weekly rankings from some of the world’s leading residential markets from the comfort of your London desk.
There are four main tests that would determine Rankdesk’s analysis of properties in a new city.
1. The quality of the property data provided by the leading estate agents in a city. Our analysts rely on a minimum level of information in order to provide a preliminary assessment of the quality and investment performance of the property. Interestingly, the London market is characterisied by a culture of rich property data with at least 65% of the Agents in the market meeting our minimum property data requirements. These include:
The quality of property specific data is particularly relevant in markets where agents are answerable only to vendors.
2. Secondly, we rely on rich information at the city or regional level. We would typically consider residential markets where there is a history of property price movements (based on actual transactions) in at least 2 property cycles. This data would also show us if the residential market in question is ‘built on solid foundations’ or on actual demand (growing city economy, labour market dynamics & household formation) rather than just speculation. This makes Rankdesk particularly suited to more mature residential markets with their equivalent growth rates and yield expectations.
3. Local Knowledge. Because of the very ‘local knowledge’ required to understand the quality and investment performance of a property in a specific neighbourhood, analysing a property from a foreign based ranking desk will provide abstract results. The HITs model would technically allow us to carry out this analysis, but having a centralised hub of analysts who are not fed ‘local’ data from on site observation of neighbourhoods and comparable properties would make Rankdesk less diligent. We are even going a step further and exploring the idea of a premium service where we would carry out an actual site visit of a property if requested by a client.
4. The openess of the market to foreign investment and to foreign ownership of property. Bringing a property on our rankings that would have equal relevance to home purchasers as well as to non-domiciled owners increases our user base exponentially.
We would love to hear of any cities that our users would find relevant in our lists and that meet the criteria above!
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