Exclusive - Be the first to test Hablib.com
www.hablib.com is the latest residential property website brought to you by Anton Kreil from the BBC2 series Million Dollar Traders. Hablib.com will launch in August 2009. It is a national UK website and is set to cause a stir due its unique offering of residential property profiling combined with the social networking capabilities of facebook, myspace, bebo and orkut.
Why The Buzz?
There is significant media interest in the launch due to the nature of the business. Hablib.com offers homeowners the opportunity to sell their home at 0% commission and £0 flat fee forever.
This is the key to the website.
At Hablib.com you don’t even need to want to sell your home to be involved. Unlike other social networking sites where people profile just themselves, at Hablib.com homeowners profile their home and themselves. Users upload photos and descriptions and collect interest in their home over time from contacts made via the site.
When a homeowner decides at some point in the future that they want to sell their home, the site makes it easy for them to do it 100% themselves without the hassle and cost of using an agent.
1,000 Homeowners Required To Profile Their Homes
Prior to launch, Hablib.com is looking for 1,000 homeowners across the UK to register with the site and profile their home. Homeowners have no downside in doing so. Your accumulated contacts are free and if in the future you decide to sell your home you will be able to do it at zero cost.
This will help Hablib test the site. The more testing we do the better the site and the bigger the savings will be for all UK homeowners.
If you believe in 0% Estate Agents fees, this is the site for you!
Send your applications to prelaunch@hablib.com. We only require your;-
1. Name
2. Age
3. Sex
40 Users Required To Test The Site
From the applications to profile homes, 40 will be selected to do specialised Pre-Launch user testing. This will involve us sending a secure password to your email, 1 month before launch, so you can use the website and fill in our questionnaire.
Hablib will be paying the 40 testers £25 for the service in cash, delivered to your door, 1 week after the site launches. Therefore £25 for 1 hours work!
We expect you to take 30 minutes to profile your home and yourself, 20 minutes to try out the functions of the site and 10 minutes to fill out and send back the questionnaire.
You will also be speaking directly to CEO Anton Kreil and Danny Bluestone (the Hablib web developer @ Cyber-Duck Ltd) about your user experience.
Please send the following details to prelaunch@hablib.com
1. Name
2. Age
3. Sex
4. Phone number
Only those that win the draw will be telephoned. No emails will be spammed and no data will be resold. We totally disagree as a company in re-selling data and it is clearly not in our commercial interests to do so.
You must be a UK homeowner and have a credit card registered to the address that you own. This is a Hablib condition and will be explained in detail on application. No money will be debited from your card what-so-ever
We look forward to hearing from you
Anton kreil (CEO)
Tags: FSBO, Hablib, Homeowners
this is a very exciting time, it makes so much sence.
just one question thou.
could this not invite criminals to use the web site to find good houses to rob?? you have probable already thought of this but just in case
king regards Kimberley
Hi kimberley, already thought of that and full addresses wont be shown and the user vets all other users as contacts. Also, all the content a user displays is at their own risk and can therefore upload or choose to not upload anything they want. Its kind of like trying to keep sex offenders or paedophiles off facebook…its inevitible they are on there, its just trying to put all the systems in place to limit it as much as possible….im more concerned about estate agents coming onto the site!
Hi Anton, are you now working full time on Hablib and no longer in trading?
hey gill,
full time on hablib and some otiher stuff…i invest long term now 5 years + so not exactly the definition of “trading”
Will you be offering advertising space on this new website or getting an affilate kick back commission from click through leads?
BR,
Chris
we will be offering advertising space yes…no affiliate “kick back” commission from click through leads…i like to think im a bit more sophisticated than that
… we’ve created a marketplace that has never existed before…if you sign up for the testing you might get to see what its all about 
Sounds interesting. I love new ideas!
Great idea Anton sounds very innovative! As a potential future home purchaser I very much look forward to seeing the site and trying it out in the future.
Also another unrelated question - is there any advance in the next series of “The Million Dollar Trader?” Really enjoyed the first series!
hi chris,
we need you! HELP US TO TEST THE SITE IN PROFILING YOURSELF AS A BUYER! we need from you
name,
age,
sex
phone number
please send to prelaunch@hablib.com
it will be a massive help!
on the MDT Second Series - watch this space,.Some interesting things are happening,but i cant say much more than that
Hi Anton!
How will the site make money?
My worry would be the confidence factor of the vendors as the only reason estate agents have survived for so long is because the vendors have always needed a person to talk to, although it may well be BS is some cases.
hi nick,
i guess with any business there is always risk….
the essence and core message of the site is that the homeowner and the consumer is king, we empower you to do all the work yourself at zero estate agency cost…we provide you with the platform and we dont want your money…thats the whole point…however there are very smart ways of monetizing the site…that dont involve charging the user for anything…
of course there is a risk that people wont like it, use it, have anything to do with it…
but thats risk, thats business, thats life.
There are many other ways the site makes money, but you’ll just have to wait and see unfortunately
Anton
Thankyou for your reply and i wish you all the best with this project.
Do you do any talks or public days i would be interested in coming along and listening.
If you don’t why not?
This project sounds very interesting and could possibly be the future of estate agaencies.
I wish you the best of luck with this new site!
William
how does it rent for first time buyers with no house to advertise? Also is just a site for selling a house or also for renting?
Great idea Anton, I am currently looking to buy a property, my problem is I live in Sydney Australia. If the project is a success would you consider going international, or just into Australia.
Australians would embrace this concept big time despite some states penchant for on site auctions …. Would be very interested in working with you at some point in the future. Brisbane, Gold Coast & Sunshine Coast is still booming. Hablib.com.au !?! Good Luck.
[...] it all before, but this project is headed by Anton Kreil from the TV series Million Dollar Traders. Anton’s blog goes on to say that this will be a site for private sellers with an element of social networking, [...]
Tepilo (as mentioned in sarah beeny blog post above) (which should, really, be deleted as spam) looks great! - How is hablib different to it?
PS: It’s August - where is hablib??
Evolutionary Internet housing move… and at just the right time!
• Sadly Hablib asking for credit card details before logon is likely to constrict or kill the take-up
• Suspect Globrix/Rightmove will follow, by allowing private sellers to list their homes.
Wellwornsalt
hi wellwornsalt, thanks for the reply. Very easy to criticise when you’re anonymous and you actually havent thought through anything you say. Anyway, what everyone says is always taken on board. Im very pragmnatic and will always listen to everybody. Believe it or not though, we did actually consider before the mini launch the upside and the downside of the CC verification. After all we like to think the average IQ of our team is over 50! here are the reasons why;-
Specifically what we do is we take no money at all. We simply match the billing address of your Debit or Credit Card with the address you want to profile / offer for sale.
There are very simple reasons why we do this.
1. UK Law - We must have measures in place (set by the Office of Fair Trading) to identify people as living at the address they are profiling or offering for sale.
2. Estate Agents - by doing so, we are protecting users from Estate Agents spamming them and attempting to get their instructions. Think about it. If an Estate Agent wants to come onto the site they will have to profile their own home and their Credit Card or debit card. In short its too difficult for them.
3. Quality Assurance. We are playing the long game. We would much rather have 25,000 people registered at the end of 2010 who are genuine owners, buyers and sellers of property than have 100,000 people who are not the actual owners of homes that are being profiled as houseproud or for sale. Whats the point of showing interest in someones home if you’re not even sure they are the owner? The site will have no purpose and value added to anybodys lives. i.e. similar to all the other 0% portals that are out there.
Users can feel comfortable by using hablib that every home is owned by the person profiled on there, every home displayed for sale is real, every buyer is really in the market to buy and no estate agents can get on the site and try to talk users into giving them their instruction by telling you they will get more for your home.
Secure with this knowledge users will want to come back because every User that another User speaks to is genuine and not a phantom or a spiv.
Also Rightmove & Globrix will never allow private sales on their sites. 95% of Rightmoves earnings are made from Estate Agents. What do you think will happen if they decided tomorrow to cut them out of the equation? Rightmove would literally be eating themselves, veritable self cannibilisation.
keep the suggestions coming
Will sellers need to indentify themselves with passports etc in order for Hablib to comply with the Money Laundering Act?
thanks for the concern angela - no … we have smarter ways of doing that but i cant tell you what they are
Hi Anton,
I genuinely wish you success, but will pose this food for thought question.
If I broke into your house, and stole your credit card and documents, which is quite common, could I then put the house online without photos (burgler unlikely to take photos of the house they robbed) ?
Have you thought about this scenario?
I know that it would be a mindless and pointless thing to do, but I have heard of criminals doing mindless things before.
Unless you are running site analytics far superior to what I have, you could only trace the lister down to area, without ISP/police help. From internet cafes would be even harder to trace.
Anyway, I totally wish you success.
Regards
Craig Miles
http://www.lincolncomputers.co.uk