Have a good weekend.
dave

Thanks for the comments, we will be indexing agents sites (scraping is such an ugly word) but we will be going direct and will not scrape Domain and Realestate unless you want to give me a big fat feed and make it easy

I am not looking for immediate cash flow (though would be happy), this is not my first business I have started or sold more interested in getting a great/large audience that loves the site. We will be taking a different approach to CPM for the site, much more results driven and will take risk on delivering results.

Also we believe there is a large value for anyone in the market that whiteants yours and domains business model, this is more important than immediate income.

Still in Alpha so nothing to show yet. Happy to show everyone once we get to beta.

Thanks

Mike

Mike, I see that you’ve got a site in the works. If you’re planning on offering all listings, does that mean you’ll be scraping them from the legitimate sites? What does that mean for your revenue model? Who become your paying customers?

I know you’ll probably want to keep some details under wraps for now, but it would be interesting to hear whatever you can share.

Dave

How many Agents in Australia are RSS or XML ready for direct feeds to an “Real Estate Search Engine”?

I think the portals will police the scraping legally. They dont want to loose control of the discussion/relationship with the user.

Re: updating RSS/XML, its not that hard to do real time for 1000′s of sites, multiheaded python or perl script that simultaneously 50-100 sites for update at a time, doesnt take long to get through 10,000 or so.

I have an XML aggregation script thats single threaded we have been playing around with that brings in about 200 feeds in about 30 sec on a shared server, so 10,000 or so on a dedicated server with a multiheaded script could update every hour.

I know this discussion was started a few months ago, would be interested to see it has moved on since then?

Mike

Phil – The rules are different but unless I’m from mars the laws are the same. Which people do you mean – SPYK or realestate.com? One has to abide by copyright aspects, the other has contracts to adhere to. I’ve got a solicitor looking over my portal contracts to see just where a small agent stands. I’m not comparing anything with offline so I’m not sure what you mean there…all I know is offline is history but I’m not going to let the portals be the gatekeeper of my listing info. Are you?

Peter, I’d love to have a buyer like that come through. But a short term gain is no good with long term credibility drain. Because for any potential buyer like that (anyone seen any?), I’ll have ten people come back to me complaining about out of date prices, old images, withdrawn properties, etc. If you think that’s not crucial, tell that to a smart-alec vendor of a million dollar house (if you’ve had this happen you’ll know how tough it can be). This is the crux guys, how do we know how SPYK or the next ones to follow are going to display current, accurate listing info by crawling a portal. I reckon google would even struggle.

I don’t have issue with SPYK, I’d prefer to see them crawl me direct so I can verify how they keep my listings current. Wouldn’t you all? (except Simon).

The whole idea about your listings – in my opinion should be about getting your vendors data to as many potential buyers as possible and if Syk gave you 3% of your sales and it cost you nothing, why would you not want this?

I really am struggling to see your point……

You have to let this sink in as fact and either accept it or don’t participate.

Traffic = leads

Leads = sales

sales = money.

I look at Spyk – and it links back to domain and realestate.com pages live on the net – so if your listings are updated as you say on these sights – then there should not be that much of a problem.

I guess the only issue is controlling where your listings appear – which is how you market a property and vendors who want you to market a property in Surry hills – but really it is in Redfern.

Still – if it sells quicker…

I think there’s one main point that I may not be making clearly enough. I think SPYK does a good job of displaying the data, certainly much better than domain or realestate do. But realestate does not have the authority to let anyone like SPYK rip out MY listings and mash them up without any degree of quality control, etc. Talk about quality control, obviously realestate was blindsided by what this site did. This indicates there is presently ZERO quality control as to how a site like SPYK maintains our listings via trawling realestate.

There’s a fundamental question here – how can I protect where my properties turn up? If the the big portals don’t control access to OUR listings via their site, then we’ve got a real problem. Because if they don’t, they’re basically telling us agents they’re in control of the listings, not us. Oh boy, wait till others here about this. My crowd’s gonna grow.