Click on this link for the Unique Property site HOME PAGE and for the full index to properties for sale:
I suppose I first went online in the seventies when I purchased, at great cost, a mobile phone. It was the size of a suitcase, weighed a ton, and was erratic to say the least. One day I lost my temper with it and threw it in the Mediterranian Sea. The experience put me off mobile phones, and I still dont own one. One day, maybe, when they do what I need I'll buy another.
I then got online by a different route, getting my phone plugged into what was called in the UK the public data network. I joined a couple of bulletin boards back in the early eighties. I had a router, and a cradle to set the handset into so it could receive the noise which sounded like high speed morse code.
In those days those of us who lived in West London had two exchanges we could use for data transfer, one in Central London, and one in Slough.
One day I heard about an invention that would make the data network more efficient. It was called the world wide web. At the time I was working for an adult training network in West London. It's a long time ago (1991) but as far as I recall after a few false starts I opened an account with an American online presence called The Well which operated out of San Francisco.
We later (1992 I think) obtained an account in the UK through an educational establishment. Towards the end of the year a public service provider went public in the UK (Demon), and we opened an account with them as well. This gave me two email accounts, which, for 1992, was pretty unusual.
At the time it struck me that this was a great way to sell houses, and I noted a dummy US property site, which I emulated for the UK. I used this for normal houses for a year, and access was free. That was the big point of it all.
Towards the end of the year I thought about putting unusual properties on the market. I had been a subscriber to a quarterly mailout from the Historic Buildings Bureau, which sent out a massive list of listed buildings for sale, including mills, castles, and all kinds of unusual properties.
Later I discovered a privately operated monthly magazine which I believe was called Alternative Househunter, which advertised itself as providing unique homes for unique people, which I thought was a fine concept.
A couple of years later I suggested to Russ, who ran this magazine, that he put it online. He was not keen, so I said I'd do it for him, and so my own site morphed into The Unique Property Site with a different url and a different provider. He still wasn't keen, and after a couple more years we lost contact with each other, but the Unique Property Site kept going, and has been going ever since.
The site has been going in one form or another since 1992, which was the year the world wide web came to Britain. We are, therefore, the oldest continuously running property website on the web.
We were the first property website in the UK; the first property site to run animated gifs (back in 1994) when most of the existing browsers couldn't even show pictures; the first to list properties for free (which we did for two years while newer sites were charging hefty rates); the first to run affiliate programs; the first to implement RSS channels; the first to set up a bulletin board; the first to run podcasts; and probably the first property site to drop rather a lot of these things later on.
More importantly we are in the top ten listings for all our categories. In fact, almost all the listings are in the top three places in Google and Yahoo.
On the Unique home page there are links to some of the praise that we've garnered. Not all of it of course, we haven't got the room. And there is a page showing screen prints of searches in the top search engines showing how well we appear. The Unique Property Site is a great place to advertise if you are trying to sell an unusual property.
Email: ask[at]middlesexdirectory.com