In Australia it is exactly the opposite. Only one place has virtually all the listings in Australia and that is realestate.com.au. They will not feed those listings to anybody including Google for obvious reasons. Anybody can create a mashup of the listing on Google Base so the minute they share that data then there will be hundreds of other sites pop up virtually over night.

Restricting access to the data is exactly what keeps realestate.com.au strong. The lack of access to the listing data has caused more than one portal to fail and is the reason that there is no serious challenge to the top 2 portals yet. I will go so far as to say that the lack of a standard and open sharing of that data is the only reason that we pay the huge subscription costs that we do. In the US there are better more featured portals that are totally free to the agent such as Zillow and Trulia that you mentioned. I bet these portals would fall over themselves to get agents to pay them $10,000 per year like we do here in Australia.

In the US the National Association of Realtors sets the standard communication protocols that everybody swaps data by. In Australia there is no official standard and market forces have dictated that the realestate.com.au is the defacto standard. In fact the NAR has a wide range of technology initiatives that would surprise most Australian Agents.

What do we have in Australia from our industry bodies regarding technology… NOTHING! Over the years they all fall over themselves trying to create income streams from real estate portals which for the most part has failed. Sure the REIV and REIWA are finally starting to get a little bit of traction but they are fighting the battle from the rear. If all the state bodies and the national bodies would have banded together in the beginning we would not have the situation we have now.

The REIA needs to take some leadership and create a standard that all industry players must follow.

Peter Ricci started discussions a year or two back trying to gain interest about setting up an XML standard. What was interesting was that all the smaller players jumped in but the top 2 portals were very reserved. I believe in the end they said they may play a part but it was very half hearted at best.

In hindsight relying upon commercial interests to set this sort of thing up is not the way to go. IMHO this should be an REIA initiative.

Ignoring the issue of subscriptions for a second.. what is interesting to consider is what is better for the agent. A couple of very strong portals holding the majority of marketshare such as Australia… or a fractured marketplace featuring lots of portals with no dominant players???

Sorry for coming in late. Glenn Rogers says (4th June 2009) “… the cost of comprehensive SEO is too high for most agents … That’s why there are portals.”

I’d be interested to know what agents think of portals in Australia, compared to what’s available in the us (e.g. Zillow, and Trulia). I’d be happy to be proven wrong but I think XML is underutilised in Australian real estate web sites and portals.

Warren Crosbie
Melbourne

I have started a 6 part SEO article series on this blog specifically targeted for Australian Real Estate Agents. Hopefully these are the other articles you checked out. Feel free to chime in with any additional hint and tips.

I am the SEO Google Real Estate Guru who wrote the article you refer to. Thanks for the mention. Hope all is good in your SEO world! I have read through several of your posts and you are right on…. Keep up the great job providing valuable SEO content. Look forward to my year end updates!

Randi Thornton

Google understands that your local agency will likely to more suitable and relevant to a user than a large multinational network site such as REA.

There is no reason why if you work with a quality website designer using a good cms that you cannot grow your enquiries outside REA/Domain. While these will drive a majority of your traffic you also have options to consider such as Adwords where you only pay per click and can target those specific keywords.

Sorry to shake up the world, but SEO is not black hat, as even common elements arent followed by “google optimised” websites….

Glenn a quick check over your site http://www.weekend.com.au shows there is still a number of points that can be further tweaked to get better rankings. Every site even large websites such Domain understand they have elements of the site to improve, but it comes down to resources,budgets and time.

The biggest point in seo is that it is not a band-aid solution or a quick fix, if you want a quick fix run a Google Adwords campaign.

http://thelostagency.wordpress.com

Good work, I’ll be overseas soon for a while and things are hotting up around here so I wont have a lot of time, but you could handle the whole thing by yourself anyway, you’ve done a terrific job on your own site.

Just a few points –

Submit your site to DMOZ http://www.dmoz.org as this feeds the Google directory.

http://www.dmoz.org/add.html

Submit to the real estate section of the LOCALITY your office is located in, keep the description free of self praise and just put in there what you do and what your site offers eg: searchable listings.

Your description will be corrected anyway it just makes it easier and perhaps quicker if you do it right in the first place.

Don’t expect to be listed straight away, it can take many months, there are over 8,000 sites waiting in unreviewed in Australia at present.

Submit to the Yahoo directory –

https://ecom.yahoo.com/dir/submit/intro/

Costs a few hundred but worth it, be sure your site is up to scratch and not under construction or it will not be included in the directory and you will not get a refund.

Make sure your site has a suitable title, thats the bit that shows in the title bar on top of your browser when the site has loaded, make sure it identifies you as an agent and your locality.

Other keywords on the home page and keywords and titles on each individual page are important also, but I’ll leave all that to Glenn otherwise I’ll just go on forever and Glenn if you want to run anything past me at any time I’m contactable at glenn@weekend.com.au

Good luck…………

If anybody wants check it out in the meantime and help accelerate our experience feel free to visit our site and join. Even if you have never used Google Friends Connect before if you already have Google (includes Gmail), AIM, Yahoo or OpenID accounts you can sign in with that.

The service allows you to very easily add page and site commenting, polls, ratings, reviews, even a basic support area and other social interaction between the visitors to your website.

I read somewhere that around 3 million websites around the world have installed the features already but I have yet to confirm this.

I don’t want to make a bid deal about it but if your interested in seeing it implemented check it out on our website (click my name to the right to visit the site as per normal). if you would prefer to see the official website then check it out at http://www.google.com/friendconnect/home/overview?hl=en_US

Obviously I would also be interested in your feedback and impressions to glenn @ nfn.com.au

Might have been easier just to tell people what to do first, ie: what directories and search engines to submit to and what simple changes to make to their web sites ie: key words and meta tags.

Once the easy stuff is out of the way then move into Google analytics etc, a gentle easing into it might be best ?