Sorry I misunderstood your point. I was just looking at the new “lifestyle” attributes within Radar. I agree that filtering too far too quickly helps neither agent or searcher. But I think Domain should be applauded for introducing something fresh – the opportunity to say that parking for example is a nice to have but not a deal breaker. I believe a set of inclusive property listings ranked by weighted preferences is more useful to all sides than a set of pre-filtered results that potentially excludes the real best fit. Every house purchase is ultimately a compromise and I’d love to see more of this “fuzziness” in the search on these sites.

I was no great fan of his at the time, we were competitors and even had the legal boys exchanging letters at one stage.

But if ever there was a company crying out for an injection of smarts it’s Fairfax and they need Baker badly even though they dont know it, which is part of the problem in there of course.

REA was 20c a share or less when Baker took over, get your facts straight.

Please dont respond at length I hate to sleep in the afternoons.

Obviously I have not explained myself fully. I totally understand that many (but not all of the criteria in Domain’s Radar does not filter, it is simply assists in the star rankings. But many of the refinement tools do filter the list.

You will notice in the example I used the differences between what they wanted and what they purchased were based on price, number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms, garaging and a pool. The only criteria in that example that does not filter the results is the pool. Swimming pools are used in the ranking process only. I mentioned nothing about being close to anything and all the other factors that effect the star rating.

My point is that by focussing on the refinement of searches less property will be served up to the buyers. For an educated searcher that is fine and it certainly makes life much easier.

As somebody who wants to put a fantastic value $400,000 property listing in front of all buyers looking to spend $400,000 it is disappointing it is not shown to as many people as possible because it is a 3 bedroom home with a study and they have selected 4 to 5 bedrooms.

Real estate agents know that many purchasers, especially in the early days of searching get this so wrong.. very wrong and by refining too far they end up not seeing properties that represent the best value for what they are looking for. It is a balance.. refine enough to get rid of the ones they definetly don’t need.. but keep in the ones that might be worth seeing.

My experience is that buyers refine too much but I think I know of a few ways to lessen the impact of refining to try and reach that balance.

For all the agents out there… What percentage of the purchasers bought specifically what they asked for. How many of them bought something that had at least one major criteria different ??

We have a lot of first and second home buyers so I reckon only 30% of our buyers purchase exactly what they originally asked for.

As RV pointed out the attributes don’t narrow the search. They enrich the user experience by providing a rating and a ranking option. Not perfect by any means but a step in the right direction from a user’s perspective. Agents like yourself will no doubt look at Domain’s market share and weigh up whether the subscription fee offers value. Always hard being second in a listings market. Maybe Domain needs to look at reducing its subscription fees and introducing performance based contextual ads. It could effectively auction the attributes to agents who would only pay when they convert into real interest. If only Fairfax Digital wasn’t shackled by its newspaper heritage.

Like everybody here, Domain can place whatever priority they want on anybody’s comments or even choose to ignore it. The fact that we were a subscriber till recently (it was actually only turned off last week) but have left them due to a price hike of 170% that we would not agree to would generally make my comments more relevant to them as Domains problems right now focus on the number of agents who have left them. However in this specific case my concern lies with attribute based searching no matter who introduces it. Limiting a list of properties by one or two attributes like bedrooms and price is generally ok, but doing so with many attributes at the same time limits the number of properties returned which will never deliver what the client wants.. Lets not forget we as the agent are the client here. We are the ones paying the bill.