When I first started looking at UK property sites in the late 1990’s, I was amazed at how bad they were.

Here we have a well established source of content, a highly active market, and a real need for timely, accurate information on what for most people is by far and away the biggest and most significant purchase they will ever make.

The biggest problem in the early days of Web property sites? Distribution of content – to find a good range of target properties, you had to visit numerous different sites, all of which had uniquely atrocious usability.

Things improved somewhat as information aggregators like Rightmove and Fish4 became property search agents representing numerous Estate Agents to bring as many properties as possible under one site. These sites still had poor usability and you still needed to visit all the main sites to make sure you didn’t miss anything.

Have they improved much? Sadly, no. The big property search sites still have bad usability, the content is presented poorly – awful photos, badly formatted text details – and when you click through to the Estate Agent’s web site, they’re usually worse.

Who to blame? Estate Agents need to make their property data more readily available to search sites, improve details and photographs, and everyone needs to make their sites more usable.

So why don’t the best sites move things forward to help raise the bar? Well, it seems that no property search site is particularly outstanding and by the time most people need to hit the property market again, they have forgotten which sites they looked at and what experience they had with them.

Is everyone just getting away with poor standards of service in this sector?