Product Landlords.co.nz
Online resource for landlords and property investors _________________________________________________ Price: Free Overall rating: 3 out of 5 Website: www.landlords.co.nz
Thursday, November 3rd 2005, 8:58AM
by Diana Clement
_________________________________________________Being a landlord can be a lonely profession. Unless you belong to the New Zealand Property Investors’ Federation or another organisation, you're unlikely to spend much time communicating with other landlords.
What's more, the business and news sections of your local newspaper are unlikely to have more than sporadic news of specific interest to property investors. But all of that can be overcome by joining an online property investment community such as that offered by Landlords.co.nz.
The website has a number of useful sections for landlords including forums, downloads, a glossary, news archive and more. Members can also send private messages to those posting on the forums and share web links and news articles with other members of the Landlords.co.nz community.
The system enables users to post news stories from various sources to the website, which are vetted before going live. In theory, if enough members get involved, this is a great method of ensuring that useful articles that appear in specialist publications are distributed to a much wider audience of interested landlords.
Also very useful is the downloadable documents section of this website, which includes links to documents ranging from tenancy agreements to bond refund documents. There are also a number of government reports on subjects such as weather tightness.
One feature that we especially liked on Landlords.co.nz was the "newsletters" forum, which enabled forum members to forward on any investment-related newsletters they receive.
We also liked the fact that Landlords.co.nz uses industry standard software for its forums. Too often websites try to re-invent the wheel by writing their own proprietary system, which invariably is full of gremlins. But none of this going on here.
Commercial postings are kept to a separate forum. There is certainly a place for such commercial postings on a landlords' website as they can be beneficial to someone in need of a service. But most web users wouldn't want such postings from members wanting to advertise their services cluttering up discussions. Landlords.co.nz runs regular polls and some of the results make interesting reading. More than 50% of more than 400 people polled, for example, had all of their money invested in property. Property investors love statistics – even the limited ones from online polls.
The Top 10 section of the site also offers a nice touch. It provides lists for list mania addicts ranging from the 10 most read stories to the 10 most downloaded files. This gives readers a real insight as to what is important to property investors who read Landlords.co.nz
The web links section is useful even if a little incomplete. One of our criticisms of Landlords.co.nz's main competitor was that it highlighted paying clients' websites and made it hard to find others. Landlords.co.nz scores a little better on this front. But there are scores of websites that should be in the list that don't appear.
The people behind this site also think of some of the small detail that can be easy to forget – such as links to report broken links and a printer friendly version of each of the stories.
It's inevitable when reviewing Landlords.co.nz to compare it with PropertyTalk.com, which despite its own failings is incredibly popular. There's no doubt that Landlords.co.nz viewed on its own is a useful site. But it's difficult for two competing websites to exist in the same space in such a small market as New Zealand.
On the downside, the search is a little difficult to figure out. On the front page of the site the Google search allows you to enter a word or phrase and search the entire website, forums, news and all. But the main search page, only allows you to search "topics", which means news and books for sale. We only figured this out after we found the word "Minimogul" in a forum posting and tested the different search options out to see if they turned up that word. As a glitch or inconsistency, it's not a biggie. But we do think the easier you make a website to use, the more likely customers will return.
The real proof in the pudding is whether people posting on the forums are getting their questions answered. The answer to that is "yes". But to be honest, the forums are not as busy as that of Landlords.co.nz's main competitor.
Also the main menu is a little confusing. The menu isn't in order of importance (or alphabetical order).
Downloads come higher up in the list of importance than the forums and news, which must be the most popular part of the site. We also wondered whether the news-related links (News Archive, Submit News, and Topics) needed to be three separate headings.
The heading "Topics" also didn't give a clear indication of what would be found when clicking on it. It was mainly news sliced and diced into different topics such as commercial property and mortgages. But it also listed the top books for sale in its bookshop (which incidentally is the Good Returns Bookshop). We also think it would be useful if the website had a regular newsletter.
We noticed that while using this site that the main banner advert never changed. While many web users ignore banner ads they can be useful in drawing your attention to useful services, new products and so on.
There's no doubt that Landlords.co.nz is a useful website for property investors and they're only going to benefit by visiting it. But in all fairness, the site probably needs some good marketing to boost interest in its forums and an update to keep pace. Landlord.co.nz's main competitor is Propertytalk.com System requirements: • Internet access ______________________________________________________ Verdict: A useful website for landlords and property investors. Pros: Simple and straightforward Cons: Needs more activity in the forums and more content
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