Website reviews

Reviews of solicitors’ property centre websites

1st December 2003 | Iain Nisbet

The 11 solicitors’ property centre websites all enable the user to search property for sale by reference to criteria such as area, price or number of bedrooms. The solicitors firms’ contact details are listed and most also have a brief guide to buying and selling.

Scottish Solicitors Property Centres

www.sspc.co.uk is the main portal site for all the SPCs across Scotland. The site, which receives an astonishing number of hits, links to the various centres through an attractive, yet simple, map interface. It is slightly confusing because some centres have more than one office - thus it appears that there are no fewer than three Dumfrieses.

Clicking on certain areas displays the offices, contact details and hyperlinks to the nearest SPCs, together with recurrent links to the Law Society of Scotland’s website. Additionally, there are email links to the Fort William and Oban SPCs, which have no websites.

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Edinburgh Solicitors Property Centre

The ESPC site www.espc.co.uk describes itself as “east central Scotland’s largest online property guide”. It is the best of the sites (if not the prettiest), having most in the way of additional features and information. Interestingly, the ESPC offers property for sale in Central Scotland, Yorkshire, the Midlands, parts of Wales and even overseas.

The site allows users to register their own “ESPC Homeline Account” which notifies househunters automatically when a property matching their specification is added to the database. It also provides a facility to save previous property searches, and allows access to the ESPC’s financial consultants. It has data on sales and average prices since 1997, and consumers can also download short but useful guides on home security and mortgages.

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Solicitors Property Centre Moray

The SPC Moray site www.spcmoray.com is noted due to its smooth, clean design and its useful interactive map of solicitors in the area. The site is easy to navigate, although one of the fields in the property matching service didn’t look to be working properly when I visited. Despite the rise in residential property prices I found a perfectly serviceable flat for offer over £45 (sic)!

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Aberdeen Solicitors Property Centre

Aberdeen’s site www.aspc.co.uk has an excellent search function, with many additional features, allowing the user to specify an area by drawing the search parameters out on a map of Aberdeenshire. The househunter can also specify which floor on a block of flats they are comfortable with and whether they are looking for central heating or a garden, or a garage. The site will automatically re-run users’ registered searches on a daily basis, e-mailing the searcher with any new results.

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Perthshire Solicitors Property Centre

www.pspc.co.uk has many of the additional search features of the ASPC and also carries a section providing legal advice. This is fairly rudimentary, amounting essentially to “be sure to see a solicitor” – excellent advice, of course. However, the stand-out feature of this site is the nifty Flash introduction. Normally this sort of thing is annoying and intrusive but it is well presented and was the only site which induced me to read about the ideas behind SPCs.

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The Scottish Borders Solicitors Property Centre

The final site I will consider in detail, www.bspcbricks.co.uk carries a great set of local links, organised as a services directory which will be useful to clients and solicitors alike. The search function does much the same as the previous sites, but manages to look much prettier than any of the others (although there is no capability to download property schedules).

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