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Searching for a new house or flat is not my favourite pastime. It tends to be a long-winded, nerve-racking process that fills your leisure time with a fog of facts, figures and phone numbers. As in so many other areas - how did people operate before the internet? Cold-calling? Pen and paper?

Surely, 90% of all property searches now begin online, usually at one of the aggregator sites like findaproperty.com, and thereafter on an estate agent’s website for the full and up-to-date information. Essentially big search engines, property websites need to offer the following core functionality:

1. A search engine that allows fine-grain filtering of search results. If I select flats, in a given region, in a given price range, I want to be able to further filter the results of this search by sub-region, number of bedrooms etc. without returning to an earlier list of options.
2. A unique URL for each property, so I can email links to friends or bookmark a page. ‘Email this page to a friend’ links are not as useful because you can only send one page at a time.
3. A method for saving both search parameters and particular properties to a personal profile. A neat feature on findaproperty.com is the option to save items permanently to an account (requiring registration) or simply saving items for the duration of a session - which allows comparison ‘on the fly’ without filling out another form.

While there are many other handy and clever features that appear on property websites - repayment advice, floor plans, interactive area maps, ‘properties you recently looked at’ - I reckon the above represent the big 3. Online property searches are often done in a hurry, so they need to be predictable, and they need to deliver. They don’t need to be complicated: witness the simple and excellent Gumtree website with its integrated Google maps.

Foxtons, perhaps not surprisingly, have for my money the best London property website. If you can handle the daily phone calls from chummy agents that result as soon as you make contact, looking for houses and flats on the Foxtons website is a pleasure: it’s clean, it’s clear, every property has a floor plan displayed with images and a ‘dashboard’ of tools including 360 degree Flash movie - even the emailshots are well put together.

Equally, some property sites aren’t so successful. Kinleigh, Folkard and Hayward have designed their site in Flash. The search works, and you can filter it via any number of variables - but at 760px wide the layout is cramped, the text too small, the buttons fiddly. Because the URL never changes, your only option is to use the email tool to save links. And even experienced web users might hit the browser’s ‘back’ button while browsing, and return to the home page with no search saved. Infuriating. I’d like to have been at the table when the site’s designers persuaded KFH that what they needed was a wizzy Flash site rather than a much simpler, more accessible design using HTML and CSS.

Another property site in need of a makeover is Benham & Reeves, who break all 3 of the above core rules thanks to their frameset-based design. I lasted about 30 seconds on this site before slamming the door behind me. In a sense though, B&R are in a better position than KFH: while KFH have already invested fairly recently, and probably quite heavily, in their website, B&R’s is an older site that can potentially be re-developed in line with the standard set by the better, more usable property sites on the web. With any luck they won’t use Flash.