Short term interests are served before all else.

Small business owners & minds…

When will this cycle end?

What effect this will have at the end of the day is anybody’s guess. The good news as far as I can see is that it cant harm the situation as far as agents and consumers are concerned, it can only make it better by providing downward pressure on the subscriptions of the current portals.

For plain vanilla horizontal search Google is King and even more so here in Australia where it dominates the local search market place. If you need more than plain vanilla horizontal search for real estate, you have to go vertical which is where the current portals come into play. Whilst you cant rule anything out, Google will probably not invade the vertical space however through their api’s they will probably let others use their data to construct real estate vertical solutions. It is these mashups that will probably compete directly with REA and Domain however because they utilise Google’s database of listings they can do so with virtually no outlay. No huge sales staff required, no executive salary packages to pay for, no massive hardware solutions required. The portals will possibly find a lot more competition in the vertical space with no one site having their market share but collectively it may be a different story. Like an invasion of fire ants, each single bite hurts but is more of an annoyance, but a whole colony can inflict massive injury.

Google will integrate your listings into their horizontal search products. Search for an actual address, and you will be offered to look at the properties for sale around that address. Search for Nerang real estate and they will offer to show you properties for sale or for rent in Nerang.

The question for all of the subscription or ad-supported vertical real estate portals (including those potential mashup sites) is if their added-value is enough to induce home searchers to click through to their site

Appreciate your explaination, I now understand the benefits and thus the anticipation from an Agent perspective.

I was looking at it from which service I would prefer to use as a consumer. I like portals because they provide some value added services, like home alerts, aggregated content from multiple agencies and filtered search interface, all wrapped up in one location.

From what I can gather, the portals would still be the major source of leads, but Google organic search would increase in value for agencies via Google Base.

I think a central hosted data source with a web API would be the preferred model. It would make it much easier for third-parties to build upon. The more free and open the better.

That exact thing has been discussed on here before. Peter Ricci actually posted an open letter asking for interested parties and got a great response but he is the one to tell you where that has moved forward to.

There were two lines of thought. One on an xml standard that all industry participants could agree on and use. This could be put in place fairly easily I would think as long as it had the support of the majority and the majors.

The second train of thought that I certainly preferred was a central data storage. That would be expensive and quite an undertaking so would require “sponsorship” by somebody.

Google Base has 5 million properties in the US. The US market has huge numbers of portals, so much so that the biggest, realtor.com has only a 4.5% market share.

Because the market is so fractured it is hard for anybody to get a good marketshare.

I believe that loading Australian properties up to the Google Base now before the Australian version is released would only give limited results but I have never tried it so I dont really know. Maybe the agents are using it more for a point of difference when listing properties, maybe they do get buyers enquries. They are yet not getting the added benefits that an Australian version would bring (ie. integration in SERPS and Maps)… but there are a lot of agencies that do it.. It could just be a case of preparing for the Australian version they have everything hooked up, so its a simple matter of sending them to the US and UK databases…. so why not. It costs nothing and can only give positive results..

An Australian Google Base brings all of the extra integration that in mind makes it all worth it.

As to a launch in Australia its inevitable of course as Australians love Google and vice versa. You just have to look at the recent Google StreetView to see that. Look at how much of Australia they covered.

Getting a hold of the real estate data should not be a problem either. If they can make arrangements with the top 15 real estate groups it only really leaves independents and many of those operate through a handful of web/xml companies and I know one of those responsible for a sizable percentage of all Australian agencies already has the data connection in place ready to go.

Google Base versions released so far have been the US, UK and Germany. Australia is a natural progression and it is only a matter of time I think.. Peter might have some news real soon on the outlook of Google Base in Australia

I would be asking my head office or my xml providor if they have a connection in place ready to go should the service be released. The api is available so there should be nothing stopping them preparing to feed data.