**This article has been updated at the bottom with a response from Brian White of the Ray White Group.** An ex Gold Coast real estate agent and current property developer, Rod Lambert has been broadcasting an interesting email to agents throughout the country today. If you have not got it in your inbox yet, chances [...]
Glenn Batten
Contributing Editor
Glenn Batten is the General Manager at First National Real Estate Nerang and Principal at the new First National Real Estate Upper Coomera office and has over 20 years real estate experience and a passion for technology. Glenn combines the two as a partner in Sellercom, a niche software developer for the real estate industry. He has been writing from an agents perspective on industry issues and covering a range of topics on Business2 since 2007.
Recent blog posts written by Glenn Batten
Real Estate Group Blocks Syndication to National Property Portals
Could you cancel your realestate.com.au and domain.com.au subscriptions in 2012? You would be forgiven for thinking real estate is all online these days it dominates the landscape that much and online the search engines are the first port of call for property related traffic. Just after leaving Simon Baker confirmed that even realestate.com.au received massive [...]
Posted In Portals
REBarCamp Concept Takes Off in Australia!
With a name like BarCamp it’s no wonder Aussie’s have taken strongly to the concept but an REBarCamp is not really about a bunch of real estate agents hanging out in the bar. A BarCamp is a user-generated conferences that is full of open participatory workshop-events, the content of which is provided by participants. A REBarCamp is [...]
Posted In Events, What's New
Project Rebellion: RPData in the Firing Line
As a followup to recent articles relating to the industry revolt and ACCC investigation into RealEstate.com.au, Australian Financial Review journalist Ben Hurley has released another article that takes aim at RPData and their valuation strategy. RPData have been working on a valuation system similar to US portal Zillow in the USA where they provide a valuation [...]
Project Rebellion: REA’s Problems Continue with ACCC Investigation Underway
In a followup article to the Front Page Project Rebellion article, Ben Hurley from the Australian Financial Review has published a new story on an ongoing investigation by the ACCC into the activities of RealEstate.com.au and to a lesser extent Domain.com.au. Questions directed at some of Australia’s leading real estate groups have seemed to focus on [...]
Project Rebellion : Front Page News!
Over the past several weeks Ben Hurley from the Australian Financial Review has been conducting an investigation into the revolt by real estate agencies around the country against Realestate.com.au. Today on the front page of the Australian Financial Review Ben’s article “Real Estate Agents Revolt” appears. The article discusses hotly debated topics on this blog [...]
Realestate.com.au 2011 Annual Customer Satisfaction Survey
In what seems like remarkable timing, sitting in my email this morning was an invitation to partake in the Annual Customer Satisfaction Survey for realestate.com.au. Now is the time to let REA know what you think of them, the good and the bad. The email includes a comment “The survey questionnaire can be completed by [...]
Realestate.com.au Backs Down From The Fight!
Realestate.com.au has always promoted itself as a portal for real estate agents but recently we have seen a surge in real estate agents using technology to operate from a digital storefront and list their properties on the portal. At first many of these websites were not run by real estate agents but REA quickly enforced [...]
Convert Facebook Profile to a Facebook Business Page
The need to leverage social media for a real estate agency is really a no-brainer these days. In 2011 Facebook is one of the easiest ways to connect with clients, potential clients and the community. Unfortunately many agencies have failed to setup their business correctly. Businesses really need to be setup as a Business Page, not a [...]
Posted In Facebook, Social Networking
3 Online Solutions for Agents to Watch Out For in 2011
Each and every year we see new online solutions or technology that enter our industry, many are raised and discussed here at length on this blog. There are 5 levels of adoption in most innovations and the challenge of many of these solutions is to break through the Innovator and Early Adopter levels and start [...]
Dirty Tricks by the Harcourts Real Estate Group?
Most real estate agencies are not that proactive when it comes to the Internet. One of the advantages of belonging to any real estate group is that members can leverage the knowledge, experience, buying power and strategies put in place by Head Office with minimal effort. Just about every head office operates a group website [...]
Posted In Soapbox
Real Estate Online Statistics & Demographics – Portals
The Google Adplanner service allows advertisers more information on popular websites including demographic and traffic information. Now whilst I don’t want to advertise on any of these sites we can still use the information to compare the portals and major brands in our industry and the results throw up some predictable and not so predictable [...]
Posted In Portals
PropertyScope – Real Estate Agents & Salespeople Get Rated!
Over the past few years there has been a huge increase in the number of social websites allowing visitors to publicly rank local businesses. I am sure everybody has seen google show those yellow stars on occassional search result pages. Websites like Twitter and Facebook allow people to comment on their experiences with you but [...]
Posted In Software
