Portal Brain answers questions about the property portal industry from data collected and checked by Online Marketplaces (OMP).
1. What it is built from
- Financial results: figures for listed portal companies and their segments, from their own reports.
- Operating metrics: company-reported figures such as paying customers.
- Executive claims: statements by portal companies and their executives.
- Deals and ownership: deals and the ownership periods they create.
- News: items on launches, people moves, deals and disputes.
- Statements from PPW talks and podcasts: notable remarks.
- AI search tests: test searches run through AI search tools in early 2026.
- Portals directory: portals worldwide.
2. How it stays current
Portal Brain is copied from OMP's research database every night. If a copy fails its checks, the previous one stays live. The date of the last copy appears as "Data as of" on every page and under every answer. Company results are picked up as they are published, and news is gathered weekly.
3. Financial figures
- One reporting basis per series. Statutory, adjusted and other bases are kept and labelled separately, and no chart or table mixes them. Adjusted figures are each company's own measure, not comparable across companies.
- Company documents first. In charts and comparisons, where a company document and a commercial data provider give the same figure, the company document wins.
- Currency. Figures are kept in the company's reporting currency and converted to US dollars at the European Central Bank's average rate for the period. Deal prices use the rate on the closing date.
- Reported periods only. Financial results are stored for years, halves and quarters (plus rare irregular periods). Last-twelve-month and nine-month results are not stored. Operating metrics are kept as reported, which can be last twelve months or year to date, and labelled so.
- Fiscal years are labelled by the calendar year in which they end: a year to 30 June 2025 is FY2025.
- First publication. A figure is kept as first published; a later restatement is labelled as restated.
4. Executive claims
A claim is a statement by a company or its executive that could in principle be checked, recorded with who said it, when and where. Claims are typed as Reported, Forecast, Comparison, Positioning or Strategic intent. Remarks by analysts, consultants and journalists are labelled as such and left out of the wriggle-room index.
Verdicts. Where possible, claims are checked against later filings. A figure within 2% of the filing is True; one the company beat, such as an exceeded forecast, is Beat; a near miss is Partial. The other verdicts are Contradicted, Inconclusive (the evidence does not settle it) and Not testable (vague, an opinion, or no deadline). Every checked verdict is shown with the filed figure behind it. Most claims have No filed figure to check yet: traffic, listings and lead counts have nothing independent to check against, and many forecasts have not reached their deadline.
The wriggle-room index measures how hard a company's claims are to pin down. Each claim faces five tests: does it carry a figure; does a forward-looking claim have a deadline; can it be proven; is it about the whole company rather than one part; would a general reader understand it. The index is the share of tests failed, from 0 to 100, published for companies with 150 or more claims, never for individuals.
5. Deals and ownership
A deal changes who owns or funds a portal or portal company, from acquisitions and funding rounds to listings and closures. Each is recorded once; a sale appears as the buyer's acquisition with the seller named. Rumours stay in the news. Prices are disclosed for fewer than half of deals.
Each ownership period opens with one deal and closes with the next. A company with no controlling holder is shown as publicly listed.
6. Statements from PPW talks and podcasts
These come from OMP's own recordings, available nowhere else. Notable statements on strategy, outlook and competition are drawn from each talk, with the speaker and their organisation. Quotes are shown word for word. Where the recording is public, the quote links to its video (the whole talk, not the moment). Statements are not verified.
7. What the AI does and does not do
The AI queries Portal Brain's data and summarises the rows it gets back; tables and charts are drawn straight from those rows. Links, records, citations, sources and verdicts are added by our code, not the AI. When Portal Brain holds nothing on a portal-industry question, the AI may search the web; what it finds appears in a separate section headed "From the web, not verified by OMP". The AI is instructed to take every other figure from Portal Brain's data. Records behind an answer are listed and numbered against its sentences.
8. Known limits
- Private companies rarely publish figures, so financial results are mostly for listed groups.
- Coverage before 2018 is thinner: fewer companies, far fewer claims, and conference statements start in 2018.
- Licensed data is never shown. Third-party data held under licence stays out; only our conclusions from it may appear.
9. Corrections
If something looks wrong, use the "Report an error" button under any answer or on any portal card. Reports are kept for OMP's research team to review; a correction made in our database appears after the next nightly copy.