What we are finding is that prospective purchasers are now going to http://www.google.com.au and typing in the address of the property of interest. This then reveals a history of the street, council DA/BA information, together with a history of sales and other relevant information pertaining to that street.

I think that Google Mapping still remains ahead of its time as it does take time to download – and sales data still remains outdated and not consistent.

I have had recent conversations with Australian Property Monitors, who are presently working on providing the market with exchange data releases. If they can pull this off this will be a first in NSW real estate history.

NSW, is that far behind compared to other states that it is an embarrasement to our industry. The information is there, just that agents refuse to share it – a classic case of dumber and dumber.

The irony being that if agents participated we would have last months sales data available within days of a month end. As against data that is generally six months old.

Another example that agents are their own worst enemy !!

Thanks for writing up the launch of our REA Labs. Yes it is based on the great Google initiative.

The reason we have done this is to provide a creative outlet for our development team. They have lots of great ideas that sometimes may not see the light of day so we wanted to create a mechanism by which they can be heard.

We also encourage our development team and product managers to take a day every fortnight to work on the fun project of their choice.

We hope that lots of fun new innovative products will be developed by this initiative.

I hear it has failed in the US as a source of real estate listings.

I have been dissapointed with the Google Maps on both realestate.com.au and domain – slow to load and quite often not up to date.

I prefer the Microsoft version on Spyke.

The unanswered question is will they start a property portal in Australia ? I put this question to a Google executive who recently inspected a home. His response to my question was a beaming

Peter, the RSS feeds are my favorite. I live in Manly and track the properties that come onto the market obsessively. A little to obsessively, perhaps.