In my opinion major portals want it every way. They want to charge high premiums for the very people that make them popular and also charge advertisers to advertise because of this popularity. I am not saying it is wrong, what I am saying is that if Google enters the market they will not be able to have it all their own way!

Frankly, I don’t see how the comparison with Google is valid, as they are not following the 4 rules that you set down.

Even so, have a go, make a business and make it good.

To be honest I think my approach would have a chance of working. Ummm, heard of Google?

Yes and they make their money from plumbers, and knitters and banks and restaurants and………………….

La La Land is starting to sound a little better!

How can you follow Tip 1 and 2 together? You can’t NOT focus on traffic and expect to build a sustainable business if you are not charging your client for the service. Do you think ads from the local plumber are going to pay for a website developer, hosting, marketing and everything else?

I see nothing wrong with charging agents and having them compete for the best inventory on a website. This is a capitalist system after all.

My pleasure, I know you have a long way to go and you will have to remember that any good ideas you have are going to be copied by others, this is just natural in this industry. I really think your site is excellent, it has its floors and just remember this blog is about views good and bad, and I think it is great to get feedback. I will be launching my new FREE version of my system on here soon, to see what feedback I get as well. I think it is good that most of the comments on here are a little on the negative side, it keeps us on our toes.

I think if you concentrate on the user experience and do not get too bogged down on making money (which I know is difficult)

Here are some tips…..
1. Do not charge agents ever! In my opinion your success will come from getting as many agents on the site as possible. Telling agents that at $50, 100, or $150 dollars a month it means amazing value compared to say realestate.com.au or domain.com.au does not cut it, when they get most of their enquiries from them.

2. Don’t get too worried about visitors until you get volume of listings. Then tell all of Australia about it.

3. Never make agents compete against each other for priority listings. Agents can easily set themselves apart from the quality of their website and the quality of the presentation of properties. (information and images)

4. Allow advertisers like banks, surveyors, builders, plumbers to advertise locally for great value and this should build a solid revenue base.

Australia is a great start, maybe look at selling your technology in other markets (and hosting it), concentrate 100% on the success of Australia and you cannot go wrong.

* RealMap will launch to the public before xmas.
* The features currently on display are just a sample of the tools buyers and agents will have at their fingertips at launch, can’t say more just yet.
* RealMap’s marketing plans, while thorough, do not rely on us competing with agents for business at google, etc – http://www.google.com.au/search?q=lj+hooker+mosman
* The pricing models under consideration aren’t currently available to Australian agents and will offer profoundly better value than existing solutions.
* Australia is the first market RealMap will be deployed in with other markets to follow. (And Peter, if the rest of the world doesn’t agree with you that it’s the world’s best, I promise I’ll let you know!)

RealMap was developed with lots of input from agents from all over Australia and we’re always keen to hear more feedback as we go.

–Dan

Elders has something like 270 agent offices, but one main web site at Eldersrealestate.com.au. Most agents have their home page within the corporate site, though there are perhaps a smattering of Elders agents who have their own websites. About 72% of Elders agents are realestate.com.au clients.

The same applies to LJ Hookers’ 500 agents. About 50% of them are our customers but all told they only have a handful of websites.

It’s true that no one knows the exact number of real estate agents in Australia. However, if you look at p. 15 of our annual report (download it from our site) you’ll see that our best estimate is that there are some 8,500. In August, 7,684 relied on us to help them reach customers in Australia and that number has only gone up since then.

But a few things need to be clarified about realmap.

1) It is not Australia’s FIRST realestate search engine – the first dedicated realestate search engine was PropertyPage – way back in 2001.

2) Realmaps design actually is a modern reinvention of PropertyPage – where the agents fed their listings directly to the DB via CSV – and consumers were taken directly to agents sites from the search results.

All realmap is doing is just having a different search interface.

3) The trouble with the realmap design at the moment is that it is trying to be lean – but still using images taken from its own DB. Absolute URLs (which PPage used) are a much cheaper and faster way of serving images for this kind of shallow DB.

4) The model design itself (where consumers go to agent sites) will work against realmap in climbing the rankings – as consumers will start to go to agent sites without real maps assistance.

5) Diverting to external sites to see full property details actually annoys consumers – the links take a long time to load – and there is no consistency in content and formatting.

This is a great little site – but lets keep it in perspective.

Perhaps the best application for this kind of Map/search is for holiday letting or viewing saved properties.

The usefull feature on the maps in beling able to filter on the fly, bedrooms etc and locatate facilities around the property.

But take it from me the map is secondary, people want to search the traditional way first THEN use a map if they want to. This obsession with maps is disturbing.

You may want maps but the people want real estate, whats the point of seeing a map with a dozen pins on the one location, you can’t differerentiate between them, quite useless in my opinion.

Would be useful for rural searches.

As far as them becoming number 3 dream on, and the comment “won’t get to number 2 in the short term” oh so you think Farfax have nothing to worry about this week ? I bet they’re relieved. The hosting required alone would sent them broke in about 10 minutes.

These maps are good but they have their place.