Then there are the websites that are just about the reviews themselves.  On Business2 we have discussed a few of those over the years but there are always new ones popping up all the time. Some of the more popular ones include Google’s Place Pages, Truelocal.com.au and ProductReview.com.au. The one thing all of these have in common is that real estate agents are just a fraction of the businesses that are reviewed.

Recently a new website called PropertyScope has cropped up that has the sole purpose of providing reviews on real estate agencies and real estate salespeople.  Already some agencies are attracting poor reviews as are salespeople like Shane Howley, David Beauregard and Chantel Penny who probably have no idea of the comments and review that have been put up for anybody to see who searches their name.

I am totally in favour of open transparency but there has been a few things that have always bugged me about  these online review sites.

Competitors voting

These sites are always open to your competitor or their immediate family and close friends voting you down and them up. This was highlighed particularly well to me recently. I created the Australian Real Estate Software and Solutions directory and a few months back I integrated a voting system allowing  real estate agents to vote on these service companies.

Voting wise everything was going well till a voting war started out in a couple of the more popular categories whereby individuals from well known suppliers would rate 10 for their own company and  1 for every other company in that category. They did not even try to hide their votes by spreading them out or varying the votes. It was either a 10 or it was a 1. The 10′s (along with their IP’s) indicated exactly who they represented.

Whilst the majority did not partake everyone suffered with low ratings. I have since deleted all the “dud” votes and changed the voting security on the site and all votes coming from non registered visitors are now moderated and anything dodgy gets tossed.

Monitoring voting irregularities is  not easy with even just 100 or so entries but there are already 1000′s of salespeople and agents already listed on the site and potentially many more to come. I hope PropertyScope have increased the security settings of their ratings plugin to as high as possible to ensure the integrity of the voting process as that really is the key.

The opinions of the minority are not always representative of the majority

You can’t sell every property nor can you totally satisfy every owner or every buyer.  Generally once you have a significant amount of genuine votes the trends will sort themselves out  fairly accurately but when you only have a limited number of responses making statements like  ”On average, this agent: underquotes to buyers by 16%” as is currently displayed on one of those profiles is potentially misleading and damaging to the salespersons’s reputation.

I believe that PropertyScope should be careful how they display this sort of data and make generalised claims.

No right of reply

Some of these review sites have no right of reply or the ability to provide perspective on the comments. One of the best examples of this is ebay where sellers can reply to a bad rating. Similarly bad ratings can be withdrawn should cooler heads prevail and or the seller rectify the problem which triggered the bad rating.

PropertyScope does not seem to have any of these balancing features in place which is a shame.

Whether PropertyScope is successful or not remains to be seen but I think agents need to quickly realise that public viewable reviews of their performance is here to stay. Proactive agents will harness this  and use it to their advantage whilst the others are try to deal with reactively and sit back and pray that some good reviews will be posted instead of bad ones.

Online Reputation Management is really turning into a new skill set that agents have to develop themselves or contract out because just a handful of bad reviews spread across just a few websites could tarnish an agents reputation overnight.

Google Rich Snippets

Google has created a service called Google Rich Snippets which takes public review results like and returns them in the  search results.  They always show at the very top of the search results and boy do they stand out.  PropertyScope has set their rankings system up with Google Rich Snippets in place so very soon when you search for your agency or the names of your salespeople it could show something like this

(preview created using the Rich Snippets Testing Tool)

Till now most real estate agents have really been restricted to paper surveys (complete with reply paid envelope) or investing significant time with the  online survey companies to make a fit our industry. Speaking for ourselves we have been surveying landlords, prospective sellers, sellers and buyers for over a decade and literally have boxes of completed surveys.  Some of the emarketing solutions also provide you a rudimentary survey ability but it really is quite basic.

Feedback is absolutely essential if you want to be fine tuning your business to suit your clients and customers. In our office each buyer and seller feedback survey is read out in full and discussed at each of sales meeting but the real deeper analysis is quite time consuming so it is done at much longer intervals.

For a little while now I have been toying with the idea of migrating our paper surveys over to one of the many great survey solutions available on the web but that would require a significant investment in time as you have to setup the survey from scratch.  These companies give you amazing building blocks but you really have to construct the building yourself to get the most out of it.

I am glad I waited though as a new online solution has been released specifically for Australian Real Estate Agents called RealSatisfied (www.realsatisfied.com.au).  They surveys are fully setup for our industry and are ready to go.  In fact once the account is setup and you have uploaded your logo your first survey could be sent out within a minute.

The service itself is very polished and professional. Late on Friday afternoon I signed up and sent out surveys to our our landlords. Within 30 minutes the first survey was back and by the time 24 hours ticked over 10% had returned the survey. By Sunday night we are close to a 20% return rate and I expect those numbers to be much higher again by mid week.

Part of the RealSatisifed Dashboard for each user.

In addition to the full details of all survey the system also asks each person to submit a testimonial and so far we have found about a third of all respondents have chosen to provide a testimonial. This alone is marketing gold but the best part is the system gives far  more statistics and analysis. Each salesperson can (optional) have a dashboard providing a selection of quick performance stats and then burrow down to find full details and responses.

In just  two days the results have been very impressive!

There are currently 6 types of Surveys

• Vendor
• Purcahser
• Landlord Placement
• Tenant Placement
• Landlord Loyalty
• Tenant Loyalty

Over the next week we will change  over our buyer and seller surveys to the RealSatisifed system but I expect a similar sort of results and I expect the statistics to only get better as you are able to track changes over time at different intervals.  This allows you to set performance targets and track changes in that performance over time.

RealSatisfied, Is it perfect? – Of course not!

It is still an off the shelf solution and it wont be an absolutely perfect fit for you but honestly what is? There are things I would slightly change or tweak but none of them is a game breaker.  There are surveys we have done for nearly a decade that the system does not do, at least for the moment.  These includes surveys for Appraisals, Lost Appraisals/listings and a few other scenarios. So whilst it’s not perfect, it’s pretty damn good~

There is the typical 30 day free trial period in which you can give it a good flogging to work out if it’s for you.  The cost works out at a base price of $39 per month (includes one account) and then $9 per additional team member.

If you do paper surveys this is going to save you substantially in time and  money and provide you and your clients a far better experience. If you are not surveying your clients then you should and this is simply the easiest purpose built way to get it done. The bonus of course is that your return rate for testimonials will probably skyrocket.

On  the RealSatisfied website you can have the surveys sent to you as though you were a client and you can also take a tour of a back end in a demo account to check out the reports.

The web analytics for the portal has been beefed up and we are about to have a lot more data to look at. With the old versions we effectively had page views and enquiries.

One of the most noticeable impacts the new site had was on the number of property views to each property. Overnight property views dropped by around 30 to 40% across the board. This was in part due to the new user interface which allowed visitors to see more of each property without browsing on the details page. Without access to page times and other data there is no way for an outsider to know exactly how much this played in the number of page drops but account managers have been using that excuse when copping flak about the drop in activity from clients.

Mark Twain once said “Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable”

So the new weapon against agents expectations and justification of the ever increasing cost is the term “Engagement”. Better get use to it!

So accordingly to REA property views are no longer relevant and will no longer be used because “measuring by property views is too limited in light of the new richer ways consumers can interact with your listings and your brand”. The measurement and benchmarking of agents in the future will be based on “total engagement” numbers.

With the focus on engagements rather than property views it means we are not going to be able to quite so easily compare against statistics to last year or even to other portals.

So what do we know now?

There are 21 new sets of statistics across four categories as follows:

Views

1. Property Details Pages
2. Property Carousel Views
3. Property Map Fly-outs

Engagement

1. Property Photo Views
2. Map Interactions
3. Floor Plan Views
4. Virtual Tour Views
5. Property Video Views
6. Street-View Views

Saving and Sharing

1. Saved to MyRealestate
2. Notes in MyRealestate
3. Print Page
4. Send to a Friend
5. Share on Social Media

Enquiry

1. Emails to Agent
2. Agent Details Views
3. Click-throughs to Agent Website
4. Inspection Times Reveals
5. Inspection Times Saved
6. Auction Times Saved
7. Property Directions

I have also been provided with a snapshot of real data that provides some interesting early perspective.  This sample is well over 100,000 property views so it should give a great indication of what to expect when it gets rolled out to everyone.

• For every 1 property view there is 7.4 property photo views in the engagement category.
• Property Carousel views are 11.5% of property page views but only 1.5% of property photo views
• Map engagements run around 2.6% against property detail page views and from this data it shows floorplans were far more popular at 3.6% Remember, most properties have a map, but very few have a floorplan so to me this highlights the importance of a floorplan.
• Street view engagement were the least popular at 1.6% of property page views
• Saving and Sharing was very very low and all 5 types combined only added up to 2.5% of property page views.
• Enquiry statistics were even lower totaling around 1.04% of property page views. This was made up with a little under half of those numbers by email (0.45%) followed by inspection times (0.20%) and  property directions (0.15%).

I think the level of detail is admirable and it will be interesting to watch how those number relate to our own agency. Right now the markets in different parts of Australia are completley different so there should be some major differences between agencies in each state so the numbers quoted above may have little or no relationship to what you might see for your own account.

There was a bunch of issues at launch but most were sorted out fairly quickly. There is however a big problem that still plagues the portal today and that relates to the email updates and ebrochures.

I personally have a range of email alerts set for different combinations of streets but I keep getting emails for all properties right across the suburb for each alert no matter where they are located. This means I am getting 4 or 5 alerts for the same property but I am yet to receive a single ebrochure to match any of those alerts.

Now in the members administration dashboard we have our first notice that the prices are on the rise again starting from the 1st of August. No details have emerged yet on just what the price rise will apply to and what the rises will be.

So do you believe that realestate.com.au can warrant a price rise right now given the massive drop in property views?

After getting a fantastic result when asking for agents to send in their traffic results for their accounts I was able to compare rural, suburban and metro agents right across Australia in all states and not a single agent received higher property views from the day of  the change over.  In fact many reported Domain and Realestateview providing more enquries than realestate.com.au for the first time ever.

The new design itself also quickly revealed itself as another way to extract a greater “share of wallet”. A term that seems to be trotted out with more and more regularity. The old Guaranteed Top Spot was pushed off to the side and now more than one property can access this upgrade. Of course this caused a few hiccups and agents had to be compensated for the change of position.  The top dog now at the top of the results list is the Premier Property option which is a brand spanking new uber-expensive add-on.

So with the new site not being as popular as realestate.com.au would have hoped for, more and more add on products to compete with, continuing email and ebrochure problems and reduced property views this new round of  price rises will no doubt be a painful pill for many to swallow.

Will we all just pay the increase because we have to?

Will the emergence of a possible Industry owned portal allow agents to consider opting out of realestate.com.au?

or Will no serious challengers arrive and despite their cost realestate.com.au continue to provide the best ROI?

Move the phone around to locate a property

Augmented Reality is when you combine a live view with a computer generated view in real time. The concept itself will not really be all the new to anybody because you have seen it in the movies and video games for years.

The processing power of handsets has risen dramatically and 1ghz is the current sweet spot. That processing power allows modern smartphones to offer augmented reality in the palm of your hand and real estate is one of those ideal applications for the technology.

The Commonwealth Bank has released what they are claiming as Australia’s first Augmented Reality using data from Realestate.com.au and RPData.com.au.

I am not one to post whole press releases so you can read it in full here although be warned it makes the same tired old claims befitting any technology launch. In one sentence they squeeze “taken to a new level” and a “revolution” with the following paragraph:

“The new iPhone application will take property search to a new level, revolutionising the way home buyers search for a home allowing them to make smarter property decisions with virtual reality insight in to any Australian home anywhere, anytime.”

One of these days somebody will put out a release thats says, “hey what we are about to launch is not new, some others beat us to it but we reckon its cool and that our version is heaps better and we hope you like it”.

We first discussed Augmented Reality back in June last year when the Layar program was released which is now available for Android and the iPhone. Layar allowed third parties to easily creating an AR solution by providing “layers” of data that could be accessed through the program. Using Layar there have been other AR solutions serving up Australian real estate but because of their data sources they have only ever offered a fraction of the available properties.

Property found! Click on the screen for more information

The CBA’s solution will be the first dedicated application for the task and this means it can bring a functionality to the handset that a Layar solution cannot. Of course access to the realestate.com.au listing data to drive the site means it only rival for sheer coverage is realestate.com.au’s own mobile site.

The application will initially be a strictly an iPhone application however an Android application is apparently on the banks radar for future development. I thought the use of the term quite entertaining because when you use an AR application it is very much like sweeping the area with your own personal radar to discover whats out there. In this case property information.

Smartphones use an internal gps and digital compass to know exactly where it is in the world at any given time. It can even tell which way it is tilted and where it is facing. It’s this ”awareness” of it’s exact location in 3 dimensional space that makes makes Augmented Reality possible.

The application will allow you to point your phone at any existing property currently for sale and it will overlay information on the property over the top such as price, bedrooms, bathrooms, car accommodation, photos and land size.

You can even use the application to search for property surrounding you location. Fire up the application and move your phone around and property for sale will flash up on the screen.

You will be able to access last sales information on all properties but it will be limited to a price range only unless it has been sold recently when the accurate sales details will be available. Consumers will of course be able to get the exact past sales details on any property for a fee thanks to the RPData connection.

View full property and information and photos in a few clicks

The program will be available in the Apple App Store sometime in June as they wait for Apple’s official approval.

I would have thought that this sort of solution would have been a better fit for realestate.com.au themselves but the Commonwealth Bank is obviously trying to leverage home loan leads by being right their in the consumers face during the research phase as they look for property.

As you would expect users can click to call a lender or complete a form to get a call from back from the Commonwealth Bank. The application will pull data live from the Realestate.com.au mobile site so I can only assume that it will still add to realestate.com.au property views which they certainly need right now.

Of course when a company release a media release before its actually available it gets a little hard to give a full and proper opinion but it looks the goods from the screenshots and the iPhone certainly has the power to pull it off. All you iPhone users will have to let me know what you think when it launches because I will have to wait till they get around to an Android version.

I reckon the application will be a hit with real estate agents and may get some of the realestate.com.au junkies away from their computer and back out into the community.

I personally am a fan of the latest version and enjoy using it so much better than the old kludgy original. Despite this I have to say it is long overdue and finally provides features that other websites have being doing for years. Far from a revolution but something that we the agents and the consumers deserve. Of course realestate.com.au have promised a roadmap of new features at regular intervals so maybe thats when the real innovation will start. Till then we can only look at how it is today.

In the first couple of weeks I expected issues and I was certainly not disappointed. I just can’t envisage rolling out a full new site that generates that much traffic and has that many pages without some problems. All the planning in the world cant allow for every eventuality. During the first day most visitors would have encountered the “Crashed” page more than once. A misbehaving Varnish HTTP accelerator caused incompatibilities with a few isp’s which resulted in a hard to diagnose issue where all styling was dropped till they identified and fixed it.

But its been a few weeks now and all the bugs should be ironed out by now shouldn’t they?

So why is there reports by agents of missing buyer enquiry emails, altered saved searches, missing search alerts and dropped traffic?

I have received a number of emails recently covering each of these problems:-

Missing Buyer Enquiry Emails

Recently there have been a few agents complaining about emails going missing. We alerted the industry to this happening once before when technicians tried to release their email queues without alerting anybody to the problem. It seems that some agents are being effected again and agents are claiming that they are not getting all their email enquiries.

Robert Simeon from Richardson and Wrench Mosman is still waiting for email enquiries from realestate.com.au. After alerting them to the dissapperance of his email enquiries they ordered a “resend” of all those enquiries.

The problem is even those emails have not turned up as at the time of writing.

Altered Save Searches

Realestate.com.au allows visitors to save particular searches and have any newly arrived properties emailed to you. When the website was upgraded these updates would have required a changeover to the site.

Real Estate agents around the country have used this facility to keep updated with their “patch”. Reports are that some of these searches were changed during the conversion process. Broad saved searches on for all property suddenly change to only report on a specific property type such as studio apartments. Other saved searches are changed so so that they have no email alerts at all and others all have a sudden price range applied when one did not exist prior.

With around 800,000 searches saved the potential for this problem to have a wide effect is pretty high so I was dissappointed to read realestate.com.au official response to originally being notified by a very (and I mean very) high spending customer.

The email they received showed detailed screen shots of prior alert emails clearly outside of the current post updated alerts. In simple terms prior to the update the system said one thing, after the udpate it said something else.

This was part of the response:-

“With regard to your claim that your email alert data was corrupted, this is the only occurrence that has been reported. Your concern that this may be widespread, and have affected many consumers at the moment is unfounded. REA has over 700 employees who all have email alerts, and not one of them has any issues. If you even just include our circle of family and friends, you can quadruple that number. I think it would be reasonable to assume that this couple of thousand people who are most engaged in using the site would be the first to notice if they had experienced any problems. No other consumer from the over 800,000 registered subscribers has reported any issues with their email alert settings, so there is no reason to think this is a widespread problem.”

Missing Search Alert Emails

This is something that we have experienced at First National Nerang. In the past many of our salespeople have managed their own email alerts on realestate.com.au but with the new changeover I decided that the
agency would manage these notices.

I had a staff member setup a number of accounts to match farm areas that we have allocated to individual salespeople. We did it this way so that should an area be allocated to a different or new salespeople we just have to change the where those emails get delivered to.

When we set the accounts up we set them originally for weekly updates but a week came and went and no email alrts were received at all. So we logged into each account and changed the alerts to be sent on a daily basis. After nearly a week we have not had one single alert email arrive with regard to any of these accounts.

I originally thought they were being picked up in the spam filter but that proved wrong. We use a service by Google called Postini. Postini is an E-mail and Web security and archiving service. One of the most useful functions is the web archiving ability which stores all emails received our sent through our exchange server.

This archiving to a professional quality assured standard has paid for itself many times over whether it be an owner who claims to have emailed through he wanted to pull an ad or a tenant who claims they reported a maintenance issue. When you explain the archiving system is third party and that everything is retained and that the email is not in those archives then many claims have simply dissappeared.

So I can confidently say that I have checked and absolutely no email alerts have been received by us regarding these newly setup alerts. I have no idea why. The searches themselves are valid. I can click on each search and it returns the correct properties but we do not get any alerts at all.

Dropped Property Views

I noticed a pretty significant trend in property views that started exactly on the day the new website went live. In a comment on this blog I recently asked other readers to send me their property view statistics to see if this was isolated to just our agency or was it more widespread.

Thanks to those who have provided me with their figures from around the country. It would take lot more results  to conclusively prove beyond any doubt that the traffic for every has fallen  but the indications are certainly not good.

Everybody who has provided stats are getting dramatically less pageviews and that commenced immediately on the first day of the new site. Indications are that those with Domain subscriptions were not similarly effected and the views remained fairly consistent for that portal. This indicates that the change is not market driven and isolated to realestate.com.au

So why have the property views dropped off?

To be fair one reason could be that the new site allows consumers to search and find their matching or ideal properties more efficiently thereby reducing the number of properties they have to wade through.  Buyers can view multiple photos in the gallery view allowing them to rule properties out whereas in the old version they had to click through to each property.

Alternatively it could also be the first three problems are more widespread and are having a fairly major effect. If just a percentage of the  800,000 are not getting the right alerts or none at all this could snowball in reduced traffic. At the moment we just cant be sure.

To put some perspective on the drop in property views here are the realestate.com.au graphs for 4 accounts each from a different state and a different marketplace. Each show a dramatic drop in views starting on day one of the relaunch. One agency show a drop of over 1000 property views per day!

It is certainly going to be interesting to see the Neilsen’s figures to correlate the reduced property views with the number of unique browsers.

Let’s be clear, I have no idea how widespread each of these problems are.  There are certainly other issues being reported but these four have the potential to make the most impact to an agents bottom line.  So we want to know if you have been having problems with any of the four issue above or another major issue please let us know here.

If you want to know how to generate the above graphs for your agency then follow these steps:

1. Login to the realestate.com.au agent admin area
2. Click on Vendor and Marketing Reports
3. Click on Internet Reports
4. Then change the Property Visits Report to show April 2010 and click on “view report”

Please share here what you find.

It seems there was a little confusion out in the west with the last list but just to clear it up, this list is for Australian Real Estate Agents to follow. Whilst there will obviously be a bias towards Australian tweeters I will be including interesting people from around the world to follow if I think it can bring something to the list.

Most of the list will be tweeting about the real estate industry however occasionally I will include other tweeters that are still of interest to agents such as @mashable who tweets about social media and @smartcompany which is Australian business news.

Like always if you feel somebody should be on the list in the future feel free you can send me your suggestion to @glenn_batten via a mention or dm.

1. @aussiehome
2. @apmasphere
3. @TRETCOMAU
4. @smartcompany
5. @peterfletcher
6. @mashable
7. @Larascott
8. @GregVincent
9. @Apimagazine
10. @TomHopkinsSales

Edit:  All the top 10 from this list, the past list and future lists can be found in my Twitter List http://twitter.com/glenn_batten/top-10-for-aussie-agents/members

I discussed the ugly side of Twitter about a year ago and in that article I said “Social networking and the internet in general has allowed a voice for everyone including your biggest critics”. Realestate.com.au found that out better than anybody as the new site went live.

Now this article is about that handled their complaints but to be fair there was a lot of praise amongst the twitter stream and facebook  as well.  But like always its the mud that sticks the longest and what people remember the most so its important that any company handles its complaints well even when they are the size of REA and there were a ton of complaints. The really impressive part was that it appears they were prepared for it and had an action plan in place that was executed brilliantly and agents should take notice. .

Someone was actively searching Twitter for any references to the relaunch and responding directly to the tweets concerned. They did not just respond to tweets directed at there twitter account of @realestate_au but they were actively seeking out anybody tweeting to their followers about the site, good and bad.

So when tweets like these started to show up

NathanKrisanski: New realestate.com.au website live today. what do you think? seems a little busy to me, but it is quicker & easier to use. DM me ur thoughts

alcro: Hey Realestate.com.au, your new site doesn’t work #REAfail

glenn_batten: @realestate_au Technical issue with your new site which may be causing more than a few people problems. http://bit.ly/bzaHuC Please fix :)

Brett_Hales: What is up with #realestate.com.au – if I search for a property everything is left justified. Looks ugly, check it out http://bit.ly/3wqDg

AnnalisaW @realestate_au can’t get it to load properly. Cumbersome. Most of content blocked by office filter.

portek I think the realestate.com.au suburb select for rentals is broken. Airport west is NOT North MElbourne.

they responded quickly to each person with:

realestate_au: @NathanKrisanski thx for your Tweet earlier today. If you have suggestions on making it less busy wld luv to hear them http://bit.ly/98znQe

realestate_au: @alcro Sorry to hear you are having issues with search – let us know the issue here and we will look into it – http://bit.ly/98znQe

realestate_au: @glenn_batten Thanks Glenn – already looking into it. Will keep you updated.

realestate_au: @Brett_Hales Glad you have been trying the new site – if you have suggestions for the search results share here – http://bit.ly/csJ79a

realestate_au @AnnalisaW sorry to hear you’re having issues – if you can, try another browser. if still having problems, let us know.

realestate_au @portek ok, might be best if you drop us a line at enquiries(at)realestate.com.au – we can direct your issue to the tech boffins there. thx

Their facebook page had similar sort of comments the only difference was that because it was on their wall they did not respond to every single comment as that would have seemed a touch too contrite.

The fact that they took the time to respond to so many consumers and agents was really fantastic and I was not the only one who thought so either:

charispalmer Impressive: @realestate_au getting back to everyone that has commented on the new site on Twitter

Rolling out a site the size and traffic load of Realestate.com.au would be a huge challenge and predictably there were problems that cropped so they didn’t just listen to the complaints on the social media  but the technical team also used to identify real issues in a live environment. They were cross referencing live tweets with server logs to fix problems very quickly even before users filled out feedback forms..

I was a victim of one of the more obscure ones where an incompatibility between our isp’s proxy server and the realestate.com.au servers caused a certain css file to be delivered blank. This meant any search result pages had no styling applied at all and was just an ugly bunch of left justified text and photos.

Now I noticed the problem during the beta testing but since I never received an invitation I had to piggy back on a somebody else’s access I never reported it through the official beta feedback. But once the site went live I and others brought it to their attention of the technical team pretty quickly. Because I had some fantastic help from Nick here on this blog they they tracked down the cause very quickly and even went so far as to ring and work with individual isp’s to track down the problem.

There are certainly still problems outstanding that team are still working on including some fairly major suburb related issues. One of these causes absolutely no properties show for major suburbs but for the most part the site is running extremely well now.

So whether you like the new style or not you have to admire how realestate.com.au handled the complaints.  Up till recently large corporations would normally respond to each call or email with the obligatory “you are the only person to be experiencing that issue” stock standard reply. But social media like Facebook and Twitter means you cant do this anymore. Everyone is far more educated and word spreads like wildfire.

Real estate groups and individual agents alike can learn a few lessons from how Realestate.com.au handled the recent release:

1. No matter how good a job you do you are never going to please everyone and there are going to be days where no matter how hard you try you just make some mistakes.
2. Be prepared and regularly monitor Twitter for tweets good and bad about your agency and your brand. Realestate.com.au probably dedicated a staff member to this job over the launch but agents thats not viable. Twilert was really good for this but it closed down because it could not handle the sheer success of Twitter but it has recently relaunched again and is a fantastic way to monitor your brand on Twitter.
3. Similarly Monitor your facebook fan page for feedback from your fans. This is certainly easier because Facebook can email you with every comment as it has been added to your wall.
4. Respond quickly, professionally and most importantly listen and be respectful.
5. Ideally offer a different more private forum to receive further information on the problem and to discuss the issue.

Of course not everything went to plan and the funny thing is that if you are looking to handle complaints about the performance of your new website, directing them back to that problematic website was probably not the best idea in hindsight. Of course there is a lesson in there as well:

jasb @realestate_au i just submitted your feedback form and got could not be found! Check ur search results layout in chrome, its screwed!

Brett_Hales @realestate_au Thanks for the opportunity to provide some feedback – didn’t go too well upon submit http://twitpic.com/1fjap1

]]> http://www.business2.com.au/2010/04/realestate-com-au-show-real-estate-agents-how-to-handle-twitter-and-facebook-complaints/feed/ 16 http://www.business2.com.au/2010/04/the-empire-strikes-back-the-print-vs-internet-battle-heats-up/ http://www.business2.com.au/2010/04/the-empire-strikes-back-the-print-vs-internet-battle-heats-up/#comments Thu, 15 Apr 2010 02:13:06 +0000 Glenn Batten http://www.business2.com.au/?p=2980 Just as RealEstate.com.au complete the launch of a new web design News Limited are putting the final strokes on a strategy to strike back and one of the weapons of choice in the fight will be a video and website called “For What It’s Worth”. This tussle between the two giants for the real estate advertising revenue has all the drama of a soap opera and our current story is reminiscent of the Empire Strikes Back, the second movie released in the Star Wars franchise.

The Star Wars movie saga  featured the Jedi, who use the Force for good, and the Sith, who use the dark side for evil in an attempt to take over the galaxy.  In the original Star Wars movie the Sith had control of the Galactic Empire. Believing themselves invincible they built the Deathstar to literally crush any opposition still remaining to their absolute domination of the Galaxy. The upstart Rebel Alliance did not have the firepower of the almighty Empire but what they lacked in firepower they made up for with cunning and skill to win the first round in the saga.

The real estate advertising market plays the part of the Galaxy that everyone is fighting for in this story and who can better fill the shoes of the Galactic Empire than Newspaper Advertising.  Up to 10 years ago there was only print as an option for agents to use and the Newspapers ruled the Galaxy with no fear at all. Then along came the internet and from that sprang the Real Estate Portals who are playing the part of the Rebel Alliance. In comparison to the traditional media organisations the portals were comparatively light and nimble and who took the fight to their lumbering foe in guerrilla fashion.

It did not take too long before the Rebel Alliance started making inroads against the Galactic Empire and the war was on.  The battle raged and in the process the Rebel Alliance destroyed the Deathstar and in the process showed the Galaxy that the Empire was able to be defeated.

In the past few years we have Newspapers losing their aura of invincibility for the Real Estate advertising dollars to the new boys on the block  the Real Estate Portals who are fighting way above their weight class.  However just when the portals were getting comfortable with their gains the Empire Strikes Back!

The movie second Star Wars movie,  The Empire Strikes Back starts with Galactic Empire recovering from recent defeats in the original installment and attempting to drive the Rebel Alliance forces back out of the Galaxy and recover what they consider is rightfully theirs.

News Limited are about to launch a fight back against the real estate portals claim on their galaxy, the real estate advertising dollars. Apparently one of the first strikes might be News Limited to stop the realestate.com.au branding on their property pages unless they start coughing up some serious dollars which REA are not prepared to do.

Another strike which is due for release very soon is the “For What It’s Worth” campaign which focuses on promoting print advertising to property sellers. The centre of the campaign is an 18 minute video that attempts to pass itself off as an independent advice to sellers on using print advertising when selling their house.  At a recent launch we were only allowed to preview just a short clip from the video which should be out very soon.

The premise of the video is that 5 or 6 experts discuss the advantages of using print from their perspective through an evidence based presentation.

The four key points the video highlights will be :

1. Choose a good marketing agent (in contrast to a transactional agent)
2. Combine Print and Online marketing
3. Invest 1% of the value of your property in marketing
4. Improve your styling and presentation for best results

There is an analyst from RPData who I presume will come up with statistics to show that houses will sell for more if they are advertised in print.  There is also a property stylist and Tom Panos from News Limited fills one of these expert slots himself.  Another one or two of the slots are to include real life vendors who provides a testimonial on how print worked for him when selling.  There is not a real estate agent in sight apparently and overall the production values on the video appears very high from what we were allowed to see.

News Limited will be providing all of their clients with the dvd’s to provide seller clients as part of a physical pre-listing kit. Of course many agents are skipping the traditional printed pre listing kit and are choosing to deliver digital versions and News Limited is finalising a website now that will feature the video that agents can provide vendors as part of a digital pre listing kit. There will probably be the typical brochures and like to hand out at listing presentations and open houses.

The message that was sold as part of the “show” and I assume will feature heavily on the video itself when we get to see it is:  that of course an agent has to advertise your property on the internet, that’s only natural and to be expected but only the very best agents use print advertising as an additional option and  they are able to leverage the print ads to achieve a premium price by as much as 10% because of the increased competition that a print campaign will create.  With print advertising you get to sell your house For What It’s Worth!

Given the short video that I have seen I actually think the concept works and has a great potential and it seemed to be well received by most agents. The fact that it uses video and the internet to push a print message is of course slightly hypocritical but I think overall it will be a positive move.

It might win them a few battles and keep them in the war a little longer but can the “For What It’s Worth” campaign kick the pesky rebels out of the Galaxy….. not by a long shot.

Any Star Wars fans out there know that by the end of the Empire Strikes Back movie the Rebel Alliance have kicked the Galactic Empires butt once again. In fact once the Empire recovers from that shellacking there is still a third movie in the original Star Wars trilogy called Return of the Jedi to be played out yet where the Rebel Alliance turns up the pressure, the Galactic Empire falls and the Emperor is killed.

These tactics might extend the life of print as an option for property advertising but I fear nothing can save it from the inevitable.

If print is still successful for you and is a valid option that you offer owners then you are probably going to love the For What It’s Worth campaign especially if you are an auction orientated agent. It has the potential to be a great tool to get VPA for print advertising. It wont be the saviour of the Newspaper Advertising for real estate agents that News Limited would like to hope for but it will make a difference and give you a great tool to add to your kit.

Of course to all the Star Wars fans out there I have to ask you to ignore any other Star Wars facts that do quite not fit this story however if you can come up with any other connections between the two sagas then share away!

For instance.. who plays the part of the Emperor… Rupert?

What about this… Darth Vader fathered Luke Skywalker who went on to destroy the empire which is just like News Limited and Fairfax spawning Realestate.com.au and Domain.com.au who then go on to threaten (and ultimately destroy) their cash cow.

I reckon realestate.com.au has been a little like a talented friend that we had as children. We all had that friend who was really good at a particular sport, or a specific subject at school. It just seemed to come naturally to them without any effort at all and they frustrated the hell of you just as much as you admired them.  No matter how hard you trained or studied you could never ever match what their natural talent and potential provided them. But despite all this they never really became world class and failed to pushed themselves beyond what they had to do to win at the school level.

The realestate.com.au portal has been like this. It’s old and tired and they never really seemed to push any boundaries because they were number one by a clear margin.

Now, I understand the whole concept about not fixing something if its not broken, but despite being the clear leader in the real estate industry online – the realestate.com.au portal has required a much needed overhaul and despite a tart up here and there every few months, it has left most unimpressed.

So, when it was announced that realestate.com.au were working on a major upgrade the industry collectively sighed as one,  ”it’s about time”. The first shock came when a proper beta test was released.  Up till now all updates seemed to have little discussion with agents, buyers and sellers, so the fact that they actively involved people from all three groups to participate in a beta program was a great harbinger of things to come.

Of course they were not going to listen to every bit of feedback they were receiving. During the process one  of the most popular complaints as voted by the beta testers themselves was the sheer number of adverts on the site.  It would take a fairly massive shift in thinking for the the adverts to disappear.

Anybody testing the site throughout the day today would have been subjected to a number of crashes – however the good news is that these seem to have been reduced significantly by this afternoon as they probably tweaked their servers and adjusted their load balancing.

Because the upgrade was based on totally new code  from the ground up it is not surprising that there were a few niggling issues when the new site  was upgraded from a few hundred beta testers to the whole shebang.

So whilst we gave you our initial opinions on the BETA test in the coming days and weeks we will give you a range of reviews and opinions from a number of the contributors. If you have checked out the site today whats your initial opinion in a nutshell… dud, master stroke or maybe somewhere in between?