Thank you Andrew i really enjoyed your input and will be in touch with you soon.

Steve W

What BALONY! A Real Estate Agent is not defined by whether they sell by commission or not. That you might engage a real estate agent on fixed price terms does not in an way imply that they are not a real estate agent. You are defining the terms so that you can then conclude these are ‘private sales’. These agents, who list on re.com.au for me without commission, are simply responding to a new market reality, and providing Real Estate Agent Services to that new market. The agent, through my $150 contract with them to list me on re.com.au, is still acting on my behalf to introduce me to buyers. They are still a third party intermediatory whom I formally engaged. Therefore it can not be said that it is private.

The internet has changed everything, we don’t need music stores to buy music anymore, we soon won’t need DVD shops to rent movies; and the role of third parties (agents) in property transactions is quickly diminishing.

All the breast. Sal

At no stage does My home is For Sale state that ‘we will get private vendors listed onto all major portals’. Our clients are not private vendors. We comply with the Private Listing Policy of the REA. This means that we must offer and undertake all the services outlined in this policy to our clients.

This is clearly stated on our website and as licensed Agents; we have the ability to list property on these sites. This comment is mischievous to say the least.

We are a discount real estate agency who offers all the services of a traditional full service agency however we don

You’re missing my point.

I’m not an agent – hence the interested observer tag.

There are two key points in this;

Firstly there are plenty of agents in Australia who would love to be able to generate over $850K gross comm in just 7 months – all without having to manage an inspection, manage an assistant or team of agents, attend a meeting or deal with a disgruntled vendor – let alone being able to do so without having to share it with their principal. I would also imagine that plenty of agents would also be happy in the current market to have an average time on market of just 54 days.

More importantly if REA allows private owner assisted sales onto the books then you could well see a two stage approach to selling being employed by vendors – particularly if these sites are able to succeed in their aims to raise multi-million dollar marketing funds.

In the longer run if it becomes easier for punters to get their properties onto REA/Domain then many of them will do so as the first stage of their selling process. They’ll try it for a couple of months – if it sells great (remember they don’t know whether an agent could have secured a premium for them) and if it doesn’t sell they head off to your office and give you a listing that is probably overpriced.

I say this because that is all that is left. Assuming they have the presentation right the only other determinants are price and promotion. Well on the promotion front they would have run a structured web campaign including listing on major portals, securing feautred listing status, been in an e-brochure and several property alerts. They’ll have a signboard and professional photos. So outside of your database they have marketed the property the exact same way you would have – except for the print ads that we all know come in well behind web and signboards for inquiry. So that leaves price. And we all know how much agent’s love vendors with strong price expectations who have exhausted many of the tools in the agent’s bag of tricks before even getting to us.

If you don’t believe this scenario could play out go and speak to a company recruiting for staff. You will almost entirely find they advertise on Seek themselves and if it doesn’t work they tap a recruiter. Where do recruiters end up – with the hard roles to fill. What happens – time taken per placement increases, total turnover of placements falls and net margin declines. Not exactly a Happy Days scenario.

Now you may say that FSBO will always be small. In the UK they represent 15%-20% of listings and have grown every year since the advent of the internet. In mainland europe the number is over 40% in some markets.
So you just never know…….

Sal

The article is not about whether Private Sellers should be allowed on to the site. Thats a business decision that realestate.com.au made when it sought the business from agents whilst Domain chose to allow agents and private sales.

The business from real estate agents has got the portal where it is today. If they chose to open themselves up to private sellers they are fully within their rights to do so. It will certainly upset a lot agents but that is simply customers expressing their opinion. As the customer in that relationship we are allowed to do that without it being considered unfair influence don’t you think? We can even vote with our feet or is that only restricted to non-agents? To satisfy your request they would have to risk upsetting virtually their whole client base and that is not something I can see shareholders accepting that easily. Thats the real reason they don’t take on private sellers.

In fact if we had the power you over REA you believe we have you can assure yourself most agents would probably focus more heavily on getting the subscription fees lowered first.

Real estate agents are not realestate.com.au’s only customers. They also deal with property developers. If agents had all this power wouldn’t you think we would be forcing realestate.com.au to stop dealing with developers insisting that they deal through an agent? The potential commission through all the developers is significantly more than a handful of private sales. But developers do not break the terms and conditions.

Another thing, lets imagine that there was one private sales site that controlled that market and was attracting significant visitors built on the backs of the support of private sellers over the past decade. I reckon you would probably be the first one to complain when they started to take agents listings to capitalise on their traffic.

What this article was about was a stated policy by realestate.com.au that they do not deal with private sellers and how some AGENTS were flouting those rules. As I predicted many of the FSBO websites took issue with that and Andrew from Property Now was amongst them. Realestate.com.au to their credit investigated the matter and stopped those agents from breaking their terms and conditions. This issue effected the majority of real estate agents and private seller websites.

Ps ‘Disgusted’, would you like our group to assist with your OFI’s or pass-on some additional enquiry we might be able to get you?

Pps Canada’s equivalent of the ACCC looks like its opening-up MLS to the public to advertise as it has considered its (‘members-only’) advertising restrictive.

Sal