It seems incredible that REA would be having a huge party, flying everyone from their global operations, to a luxury resort, whilst their customers face hard times.

I wonder how many will be flying business class?

A bit of fat at REA it seems.

Paddy, your comment about content is important. I don’t see any Australian portal moving to a subscription model which encourages agents to list less properties. Portals survive on content and having lots of it, so they want agents to list as many properties as possible.

The current pay per property model works against this goal in that you pay more per property when you creep into a new pricing bracket. Looking at the Find A Property subscription costs, when you list 25 properties you pay

I heard that RPData is getting ‘very quick’ ‘feeds’ of listings from REA as soon as agents take them ‘off’. They then sell them back in ‘value-added’ form to the agents. So, how much is REA making from this? And if they are, what are the agents due from the process?

Given copyright vests with the content creator, does this breach the listing agent’s copyright ?

(Despite M McNamara and RPData’s mantra, I believe the base value in such data is in the listing and data addition provided by the agent – anyone can get Govt and vals type data but it is the original property listing and sales price etc that is the gold!)

Perhaps agents should be placing a value on their listing and recouping some subs costs from RPData via REA (and Domain who owns their own data house)?

Sal

You make some great points. Regarding private sellers – if agents are concerned about advertisements appearing on property portals they should have a good hard look at their respective business models. I don’t have a propblem with this at all – as the smart agencies should use this as a perfect point of difference where their business model excels under such scrutiny.

I see a major problem in our industry where agents keep taking investing back in their respective businesses for granted. No better example than the internet. An over reliance on third party assistance is a scary business model in my opinion.

Property.com.au was originally Real Estate View (truncated to R.E.View), a JV between the REIV who assisted with marketing to other states. Following the debacle previously mentioned, it was ‘taken private’. It ended-up at PMP (the Yellow Pages and mag publishers and printers) which was controlled by Murdoch, who was very keen on it. Murdoch saw PMP collapsing and got out leaving Property.com.au to be picked-up by RPData who sold to REA – giving them the aggregation of their then major competitor whom they needed to dominate.

1. Property.com.au was owned by RPData wasn’t it? RPData sold property.com.au to REA as part of an overall deal regarding data and what appears to be display advertising. Sal are you saying that RPData bought it from the ‘industry’?

2. Bryan Thompson – you and others keep talking about NZ being a best practice case. But isn’t it more of a case of being lucky?

Think about Property Page Partners NZ Ltd, and their relationship with the NZ institute over the years (I am not even raising the PPLNZ and PPL AUS touchy relationship). It is only in recent years that the relationship started to work.

Then think about NZ only having 1 (one) REI, and favourable legislation towards it by the Govt. Essentially a closed shop philosophy.

Is it more of a case of, how amazing is it that NZ took so long to get it right?

Congratulations to all in NZ, the result is great. But given all the market conditions, the result should have been achieved many years ago.

3. The established portals will want to stay with their Subscription model, purely because with an ‘all you can eat’ price point, they get all of a subscribing agents listings. (i.e. all the content for consumers).

They know that if they go to a per property model, that they will lose content, and most likely the ability to sell ‘depth products’.

They will most likely implement ‘packages’ of 0-10, 11-20 etc… packages, but only if Google’s foray starts delivering results for agents.

4. Google – has a great opportunity, but there are some issues to over come. EG. Private Sellers will be able to list (is everyone ok with that?), there will be duplicate listings (harder to manage without a dedicated Property category IT team), you will most likely not have an account manager, so who do you talk to, to get things resolved? What about Data ownership – who owns it and what will Google do to prevent agents listings properties they do not have the authority for?

Still, if we all have realistic expectations for Google, and realise it is Search based on Maps, and not another REA or Domain – then the end results could be very exciting.

No wonder REA and Domain are ‘tad cold’ as a % of their revenues are at stake. Which makes more sense:

a) Paying a Premium Subscription or Feature listings on the established portals. (Basic Subscriptions do the job, as home buyers will look at all online properties which match their criteria)

or

b) Paying a smaller amount of money to promote your listings, business and website on Google? Access to Google’s UB’s is extremely attractive, particularly if your listings are bringing people to your website.

It is certainly going to be interesting.

Sorry,
Sal