When you see what some of the leading sites around the world like http://www.trulia.com, http://www.neighboroo.com, http://www.housingmaps.com, http://www.hotpads.com and http://www.properazzi.com have done with Google Maps you can appreciate the pressure that will be applied here in our market soon.

If these type of companies get a foothold into the Australian market like I think they will, I think Robert will be proven to be 100% correct as none of them charge the agent. The agent can concentrate on his own website and aggregators and the like will serve him up visitors and enquiries directly back to their sites.

New innovations like Google’s Maplets allow users to view real estate listings from multiple sources at the same time without navigating away from the Google Maps page. View how maplets are going to work at http://maps.google.com/maps/mm?mapprev=1 and see who has already have maplets ready to roll out in the real estate

category here http://maps.google.com/ig/directory?synd=mpl&pid=mpl&num=24&q=real estate&btnG=SearchGoogleMapsContent

Then there is the new Street View which allows users to view ever property and the surrounding neighbourhood from street level. The public is just going to lap this up when all these companies start rolling this out. Check out street view here

http://maps.google.com/maps/mm?mapprev=1&ie=UTF8&om=0&layer=c&cbll=37.329652,-121.90905&cbp=1,89.3566445946308,0.50810832508598,0&ll=37.332853,-121.907837&spn=0.007678,0.013196&z=16

You can zoom in on properties, view full screen, rotate around and move up and down the streets. This is the future and unless our Australian portals evolve they will be left behind. I for one think they will evolve as I am sure they are not a bunch of idiots, their future sucess comes down to more of a case of when they will evolve and by how much.

Please note that at the time of posting these new Google Tools are only developers previews and they are not quite ready for release I dont think. The Google Australia team should be very proud of what they started with Google Maps.

The launch of the new version of Homehound is promising but nothing as yet to threaten realestate.com.au. Now if I had the budget to spend that PBL did recently I would have negotiated with Trulia for the Australian rights and brought something like this to the Australian market that would have threatened REA and Domain immediately.. Check this out..

http://www.trulia.com/property/31393629-1904-Se-1st-Ave-Fort-Lauderdale-FL-33316

Just look at the information they offer consumers and remember, this is not a portal, Trulia is an aggregator. Real estate search engines and aggregators help buyers find property by collecting (or aggregating) listings from multiple sources into a one location. They crawling, index and then organise and map listings for buyers. They are not trying to keep the enquiry and serve it up to you to justify a high monthly cost like a portal. If you click for more details on this property it sends you to the agents site (or in this case his MLS ‘s site). You enquire about the property directly to the agent, not to some go-between that keeps waving it in front of you to justify the money they take out of your pocket every month.

Myhome tried to play REA’s game in REA’s market place with shiny new ball and new shoes and thats it. No suprise that REA and Domain beat them down.. They should have brought a better game to the market that a bloated company like REA could not adjust so quickly for.

Unfortunatley they have spent too much money on this dog to change direction now so they have to get some return on their investment.

REA is the best we have right now and I currently believe that everybody should be with them but times are a changing… As Peter has pointed out, REA and domain know that to, why else would they be trying to get us to sign up to a 2 year contract. I hope they do evolve along with Domain but will not be surprised if they don’t.

thank you.

I actaully like the new homehound to the old one, and prefer it to myhome. But it just feels a bit to technical with those maps which are too big for my screen.

But isn’t it interesting that both homehound and myhome, sites with a lot of money poured into them, have the franchisors involved. One site will make their agents pay, the other is a free site.

Makes me wonder what the franchisees think of all of this.

E

Sam, tell me what a good portal looks like, and what it has. You keep rubbishing everything out there, but how about some insight into what you would do if you had a few million dollars (to spend on a portal that is)

I am genuinely interested.

E

Is this a misguided cash or contra for comment again?

Like those free products from sitting on the Domain discovery committee?

How is John Laws these days?

E