Involving agents and consumers before a product is released seems a natural thing to do but we certainly have not seen that in previous user interface tweaks. So in that light it is itself a fantastic improvement and an indicator that the company might finally listening.

I have spent a few hours with the BETA version and overall the impression is fairly good. Now since this is a beta  I am not going to comment on the problems or issues on the site. Yes there are still quite a few challenges ahead for the team as it’s public release looms but that is what a beta programme is all about. Finding and fixing those issues.

So lets take a glass is half full look at it now and leave the critques to the public release.  I am sure Peter Ricci will be looking at doing a full indepth review when it goes live but here is a much shorter “teaser” of things to come.

In general the look and feel of the site has not changed that much. As far as the interface goes it is more of an improvement rather than a full redesign.

The map and quick search options take more of a central role on the home page and don’t get drowned out as they do on the current version.

The look and styling is much more contemporary and not quite so old and tired looking. We are talking about small things like rounded corners on boxes, colours and shading… small things but they do make a difference. The whole design seems focussed on improving the buyer or browsers experience.

Searching is better both from the home page and the refinement tools and there is no search box on every page, even individual property pages.  Search results don’t seem to be limited to just 200 properties which is about time and you now have an option to “exclude properties under offer/contract” as well as the traditional “Include surrounding suburbs”

I did notice that there is now no links to the Realestate.com.au blogs that have sat idle without an update for 12 to 18 months.

The ads are still there (honestly, who really thought they would be removed?) but I can say they are far less distracting and I believe there may even be less. Well thats the impression anyway. I cant really comment on the search results pages themselves as they do not display correctly for me at all no matter what browser I use. The property pages themselves come up fine and this is where I believe some of the best improvements are.

The design is primarily a two column design rather than the current three column design. The persistent left hand menu is now gone which means that the content takes up much more across the width of the page. Also because there is now room for the extra photo thumbnails to sit up beside the main photo they don’t eat into the centre column leaving in less space for the property description.

All in all this requires far less scrolling and is a much more functional and useable. Photos open in a new page rather than popup over the top of the property page.

The local voices information is located in a much better postion off to the right hand side rather in the main content area. this means that each column is closer to the same length making better effecient use of the page and again less scrolling.

Open houses can now be downloaded as an ical file which allows you to easily add in a click or two the details of the open house right into your calendar either on your smartphone or your desktop.

Not all changes are limited to the front end though. One of the big problems that has been a problem for a handful of agents is when a suburb name is used twice in the same state.  One example of this is the Suburb of West End which is in Brisbane and Townsville. Searching for west end will always return properties in both suburbs. That is now fixed.

I believe buyers will like the new recommendation engine and the ability to compare properties in side by side comparison system.

The new design team are using the UserVoice feedback system to collect feedback from and interact with the beta testers. I have used the is system a few times from a users perspective and it is really slick allowing users to vote on current support issues and even create their own.

It’s interesting to see that feedback they are getting from consumers using this system. Here is a quick collection (not all of them by a longshot) of some of the more popular suggested ideas that would be of most interest to readers.

Popular ideas as suggested by beta testers

• Map Pins need to change colour when you’ve click on them
• Too many ads
• Show rental prices in an area I am looking to buy
• Should be an exclude auctions option when doing a search
• List the agents underquoting . Show their estimate and the acutal sale price.

Popular ideas as suggested by Realestate.com.au

• Allow me to search by a keyword
• Make it so that I can remove proeprties from my search that I dont want to see again
• The new site seems a lot quicker and I like the new design
• Show me the properties I like on the home page

Other ideas suggested by Realestate.com.au not getting many votes so far at least

• Display the number of days a property has been listed on the site.
• I like the new site but I would like to see better images

The ideas raised by the realestate.com.au are of particular interest because the give a few clues to what the team are considering integrating and in the case of the post about liking the new design, thats just trolling for compliments they can use in their marketing.

The overall improvements are very much needed but there are quite alot of bugs to sort out between now and the launch which is due in April sometime. I am glad to say that the new version will for the most part at least be a positive step forward. There will always be those that preferred the old model but they should be in the minority and I for one am looking forward to the new release.

Certainly they could have done more, and I am not a fan of everything that they have changed but with the number one site in the space you have to be mindful of the “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” rule. Many users did not even notice some of the more recent upgrades to the site have  they have been that minor. You are going to miss this one though.  Whilst it sort of looks the same… it is well and truly different.

If anybody else has had access to the test site then please share your opinions of what you think of the site so far keeping in mind it is still in BETA and bugs are to be expected.  Remember the glass is half full on this one for now :)

1. There is absolutely nothing in this world like Facebook for connecting with all your old friends. The most successful people in real estate truly understand that networking is one of the real key’s to this industry and setting up a Facebook profile is drop dead easy thing to do to take advantage of it. Most of your old friends probably did not even know you were in real estate anyway. In sales the BIGGER YOUR SPHERE OF INFLUENCE THE BETTER.
2. Facebook and Twitter are truly opt-in marketing. There can be no chance that you can ever have provisions of the the privacy act thrown at you as they chose to follow you and they still WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU.
3. Testimonials are like gold for real estate agents and Linkedin allows you to write and receive business testimonials from other members. Testimonials that you approve become part of your profile for everyone to see. WHO DOES NOT WANT ANYMORE TESTIMONIALS?
4. Ensure your following the right people on Twitter as it is simply the best barometer on the real estate industry. Everyday you will get the latest training tips, strategies, news and commentary and all in just 140 characters each. On Twitter follow few and follow quality and YOU WILL BE REWARDED. Try to follow too many and it all just turns into noise.
5. Networking with others in and associated with our industry is just as important as networking with potential clients. When you are looking to contact someone you have never met Linkedin shows you who in your network already knows them and how. Linked in allows you to BUILD RELATIONSHIPS AND CONNECTIONS INSIDE THE INDUSTRY.
6. Twitter Search is a fantastic way to keep abreast of just what people are saying about your company, your brand or a recent advertising campaign. You get to see exactly what consumers are TELLING THEIR FRIENDS ABOUT YOU.
7. If they find it interesting or worth sharing,  your friends and followers will spread your news for you when they retweet, comment or like something that you post. The power of social networking is INCREDIBLE WHEN IT GOES VIRAL.
8. Tweets are now integrated live into the Google Search Engine Results Pages. Facebook Fan Pages and Twitter Lists are now in the Google Index which makes setting up a Twitter Account and Facebook Profile the EASIEST SEO ON THE PLANET.
9. If you dont like someone or they are posting or tweeting rubbish… you can just DELETE THEM!
10. Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin are 100% FREE…  at least for now.

Even the prestigious New York Times has fallen on hard times and in the same year as picking up 5 Pullitzer Prizes last year for journalism, the second highest yearly haul by one paper in history, they also received a cash injection by Mexican Billionaire Carlos Slim Helu of $250 million dollars just to keep it afloat.

Now the New York Times is probably no different than the vast majority of newspapers out there. They were simply overrun by the internet in the early days and their attempts to play catch up have in general been far from successful.   Leading newspapers have all invested very heavily in slick websites that in many cases generate huge traffic,  but they have failed to capture enough online advertising revenue to support the massive expense of running a newspaper.

So when advertising does not cover the running costs the next revenue source to consider is the readers themselves. But here is where the problem lies as consumers are loathe to pay for something on the internet at the best of times. There are many things that are working against  the newspapers charging for content. There seems like an  endless amount of  other sites that offer the same news for free so the perceived value for news content is very very low. The rise of blogging has increased the amount of opinion based content on the web and there is only so much time a consumer can spend reading.

But the biggest hindrance to digital newspapers has been that readers are bound to their computer. You can’t take your computer out by the pool, or during morning relief visits, at least not without some significant discomfort and space issues.

This is where the Apple iPad kicks in. Now all you Apple fans better skip to the next paragraph because firstly I have to say that nothing that the iPad brings to the table is revolutionary. In fact they are tackling a market place that others have literally failed at capturing for years as there have been full blown tablet pc’s for quite awhile and even lesser powered internet tablets in recent years. So if the iPad brings very little over others before it then what has caused all this fuss. It’s the Apple flavour…. the brand….. the user interface!  Apple can make it look cool and just the apple name will get it into people’s hands and once there they will love it. All in all I reckon they will have a massive success on their hands!

Tablets to date have seen very little takeup by consumers and have been very limited to niche business markets. In fact one of those niche markets for tablet pc’s in the US is real estate agents for the very reasons that Greg mentioned in his article on how the iPad could be used for the real estate industry.  Agents in the US have been using tablets successfully for years and according to recent tech surveys in the US tablet pc use amongst agents is increasing rapidly.  But to date, Microsoft and the hardware companies have failed to capture the consumers interest in tablets. At the CES Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas recently Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer failed to get much interest in the HP tablet he showed the crowd. In contrast, Steve Jobs from Apple has had the world talking about the iPad since it was announced last month.

Overnight we have consumers around the world salivating over a tablet pc.  Apple can do what everyone else has struggled with and make it look cool and trendy.  When it launches you can bet the system will be slick and super fast. Like the iPhone Apple may cripple some more advanced functions to ensure the general usability remains  very high. The iPhone cannot  do true multi tasking, applications widgets can’t be placed on the home screen and the security is a nightmare for developers such as an applications cannot change system settings based up on gps input.  The hardware and software can do it but all quite easily but at the risk of stability and speed.  As an example if the iPhone was allowed to multitask a user may open 10 programs which could slow their iPhone to a crawl but they won’t blame themselves for pushing it beyond its limit, they will blame the iPhone for poor performance.  So Apple just does not allow it and whilst a few will complain of being constrained by Apples limitations placed on its products the vast majority will love the speed and usability.

The iPad has eReader software built. Because it operates on backlit screen technology like a computer screen I can’t see it taking over from the likes of dedicated digital e-ink screen readers for novels. An e-ink reader such as the Amazon Kindle has no backlight which eliminates the eye strain allowing you to read for long periods at a time and is why Amazon and other dedicated ereader manufacturers chose the e-ink technology. Backlights also suck battery power so whilst an iPad’s battery life is measured in hours an e-ink based reader is measured in weeks  Last year there was over 3 million eReaders sold and that is expected to at least double this year.  Our household now has two e-readers and I know of 8 that were purchased by friends after viewing having a play with one of ours.

Novels could really only be consumed in comfort on the iPad over short reading periods which is fine for those on a bus, or a flight this is not going to work for most readers. But unlike reading a novel, newspapers and magazines are normally only read over a short period and the iPad appears to be the perfect marriage for digital newspapers.   E-ink technology is only just moving in to colour but because of the limitations of the technology itself the pages will only ever be static. In contrast the screen of a tablet pc is just like a computer screen and you can view and zoom in on high resolution pictures and video embedded into the articles. So the eReader software on the iPad is great and would make an excellent platform for reading a digital newspaper but even better are custom applications purpose built for the iPad such as the one released by the New York Times to provide an ultimate newspaper experience. The best of both worlds!

You can bet that with the consumers interest in tablet pc’s on the rise that other manufacturers will now jump on the bandwagon and be developing similar consumer orientated models. Because the iPad and its tablet predecessors and soon to follow clones offer an excellent mobile reading solution that seems perfect fit for the digital newspaper the media corporations might finally be able to instill a sense of value into subscription and paywall options and start generating some of that desperately need revenue.

The possibilities for real estate advertising over such as delivery method is absolutley mind blowing. High resolution images, audio and even video tours embedded into your ad and direct linking to your website as the reader sips on a drink poolside may soon be a reality. If they want to stay relevant, and some would say even stay alive, the likes of News Corp and Fairfax have to seize  on this opportunity and develop solutions that the public would be happy to pay for.  Finally old media could properly leverage the new media  they have been trying to tame for years and we as agents could jump on for the ride.

It’s a big step for them to take if they hope to convert from a print to a digital medium and only time will tell. The massive media corporations around the world might be behind in the fight but do they have the second wind and the will to battle to the bell? Media executives around the world will be watching the  New York Times like a hawk but the first stage of success will the public’s acceptance of the Tablet form factor.

Would you pay for a digital edition of your local newspaper if you could view it on something like the iPad? I know I would, its just the price that may be the issue! It stands to reason that if readership was again on the rise  and a new cost structure based on a digital delivery method then agents spending on newspaper advertising would return and the media executives would not have to feel so guilty taking those big bonuses.

First I tried to do some research on the make and model I was looking to purchase and found very very little information on the car itself outside of the standard manufacturers blurb. Even all the online driving reviews were only 10 to 20% original and the rest was padded out with the manufacturers press releases word for word.

I visited a number of dealer websites and they were flashy enough but provided very little substance or information.  I found only one business based site that went to the trouble of creating unique content and conducted significant research. The only other websites that provided anything original were the enthusiast websites and forums.

I could not find any blogs run by Subaru dealers, nobody on Twitter tweeting the latest news for that manufacturer or any dealer fan pages on Facebook. No matter what I tried emarketing seemed to be non existent.

I started searching outside of Australia and found excellent examples of Motor Dealers embracing social media. Austin Subaru for instance has around 4000 facebook fans. Every time they post something to their facebook page 4000 local subaru enthusiasts get the message and when one of those 4000 fans comment or click on the “like” button all their friends get the message too.

The next thing for me to check out was the Portals. The motor industry online is dominated by several portals the same as the real estate industry but that is where the similarities stop. What I did not notice at first was that you do not see on the portals any dealer contact information anywhere. The portals completely control all contact between the dealer and the interested party. To make a phone enquiry you have to dial a number and punch in the car ID to be connected.

As a prospective purchaser this was downright annoying but it wasn’t till I realised that the portals were controlling every single enquiry so they could charge an enquiry rate that I was really disgusted as it made the whole enquiry experience very frustrating.

So how much was a dealer being charged for a single enquiry? What would you think would be fair? I was thinking $2 or $3 maybe. I naturally asked my dealer and was shocked with the answer. They told me car dealers are paying well over $30 per enquiry and apparently many are paying much more than that as well. That’s $30 for every phone call or email generated by the portal. Apparently it’s not unusual for a potential customer to continue to use the portals phone number to contact the dealer again which just magnifies the whole cost.

As you can imagine large car dealers are paying a serious amount of money to these portals every single month. It appears to me that because they have not created their own online presence or invested in other forms of emarketing they are locked into using these portals and their extortionate prices.

Now this is the part that really confused me. The keyword tools in my Google Adwords account tells me that the average CPC rate for  keywords like subaru, subaru liberty and subaru impreza is under 40 cents so if you are going to pay that much for each enquiry from the dealers why dont they invest in pay per click campaigns targeted specifically at new car purchasers. Google Adwords allow you to geographically target your ads down to a particular town or city which is perfect for the car industry. Real Estate agents generally operate in much smaller areas, as small in some cases as one or two suburbs of a whole city. This means that geographic targetting can have mixed results for our industry but not so with car dealers.

I ran a few searches online for Subaru cars and all the ad slots were filled with the different car portals including carsales.com.au, carpoint.com.au, privatefleet.com.au and carsguide.com.au. Not one local dealer trying to generate enquiries at a fraction of what the portals would charge.

Now real estate portals use adwords too but because of the per enquiry charge rate  of the car portals they are effectively engaging in a form of “Enquiry Arbitrage”.   They buy an enquiry or a click for $1 from Google then they sell it to a dealer for $30. Now not all those clicks will convert to an enquiry but what if they get just a 10% conversion rate that’s still a 300% return on their investment.

Too often we look back and say that real estate agents as an industry have not done enough to insulate themselves against the sheer market strength of the real estate portals. But in light of how the motor industry are treated maybe we should be looking at the glass half full not half empty.

On another note, maybe REA should look at the motor industry. A corporation has to be constantly growing or its share prices suffer. Because they have saturated the Australian market they tried to expand overseas but was obviously no success and they ended up retreating out of some markets and blowing their investment. So instead of ramping the prices up on agents why dont they diversify in the motor industry. They have the experience in online classified advertising and their model would compete well against the per enquiry models.

Now I am the first to admit that my experience with the motor industry online is pretty limited so if anybody has anything to add on the subject I would love to hear it.

Social Networking followed blogs by about 5 years and started gaining momentum soon after the millennium. Websites like Facebook and Twitter have gained hugely in popularity and proactive agents have been early adopters of social networking.

The problem with social networking from a marketing perspective is that their instantaneous nature means that they are very much like throwing handfulls of snow in a snowball fight and hoping some of them hit home. Stop throwing and you will stop hitting people. This means that to get great results you have to be constantly posting which can be very time consuming for many agents.

Tweets on Twitter have a lifespan measured in minutes and will normally be most effective within 10 to 15 minutes of posting. Facebook posts are a little longer lasting but their effectiveness is still measured in days. Blogs posts on the other hand keeps on giving days, weeks, months and even years later.

At Nerang First National we have had our blog going for a little over a year now and during that time we have posted up 57 articles which equates to around 1 article per week. Posts that I made in the first month are still being read and attracting visitors over a year later.

In the context of our snowball fight think of blog posts like rolling your snowballs down the hill at the opposition. You write an article just once and every day it’s readership is just getting bigger and bigger with no further work from yourself.

To illustrate  this here is the statistics for two o four posts.

Funny Real Estate Photos was posted in July 2009 and has been one of our more popular articles.

Every month the readership of our blog increases and in the past year we have had close to 10,000 views on the website. If the month on month growth continues we should see well over double that traffic over the next 12 months. But blog readership is not all about web visitors as articles can be read a few other ways including an RSS reader like Google Reader, and through email subscription. Unfortunately tracking those views is far more difficult.

In addition to our own readership we have also been lucky enough for about 7 or 8 of our blog articles to be picked up and republished in the Gold Coast Bulletins Lifestyle Guide with full credit back to our agency. We also use many of the blog articles on our facebook page and in our email and printed newsletters.

I talk with other agents all the time who want a start a blog but are often put off because they believe that it costs a lot or is beyond their technical skills to setup. So to show people just how easy it is I decided to take setup a blog another First National member and use screen capture software to capture the process and offer it up as a video tutorial.

The Blog I set up was for Bushby First National in Tasmania.

I asked them to provide me with just three things

1. Create an account on Wordpress.com. I could have done this as part of the process but this way they get to select their username, password and email that they want.
2. A header image  to suit the theme I was going to use which was 770 pixels x 140 pixels
3. Copy of a first article with matching pictures.

Using just those resources I was able to setup a blog on Wordpress.com and post the first article in around 25 minutes and it was all absolutely free. I took a couple of calls in between so you may see the video jump around where I stopped and started a few times.

Now what you will not see is an amazing professional Propvid style special effects, professional voice overs or mind blowing editing. What you (hopefully) will see is a quick and easy way to get your first blog up and running today. So be kind with my video skills… even you Brett!! :)

Wordpress.com is not the only free blogging service around but it is the one I recommend. The services uses the Wordpress blogging platform albeit a very locked down version to provide a free blogging service.

Wordpress is the underlying blogging platform that runs the Business2 blog and in a followup article I will cover options of how to upgrade your blog. This will cover domain mapping and even upgrading to a self hosted wordpress solution just like Business2 or my personal blog at glennbatten.com. A self hosted version of Wordpress allows you to install your own plugins and themes and provides greater functionality but you need to crawl before you walk and so a Wordpress.com blog is the perfect start that provides you with access to a powerful upgrade path for the future.

Anyway on with the show. The whole tutorial covers three separate videos thanks to Youtubes 10 minute limitation.

You will notice that the address of the blog in the video is bushbyfn.wordpress.com. Since creating the site Bushby First National has since purchased their own domain bushbyblog.com.au and used the Domain mapping upgrade on Wordpress.com (about $US10 per year) to map this new domain to their wordpress blog.

If you follow the tutorial and use it to setup your own blog please share it’s address with everyone in the comments section. Also, if  you are a real estate agent and already operate a blog for your agency then please share its address and your experiences to date so those considering setting up a blog can be inspired and learn from your experiences.

I would highly recommend any agency who wants to interact with their community, increase their brand profile and leverage more visitors to their main website consider starting up a blog. You don’t have  to go into as much detail in your articles as I have  on some of them.  Keeping it topical, opinionated and up to date is far more important.

Anybody who has been reading my articles on this site will notice the occasional cross over articles on our blog where I have written on the same subject but just from different angles. The article titled “Google Real Estate and Nerang, Highland Park, Carrara and Worongary” is the perfect example. Just write whatever comes into your head that you want to share. At first it may seem a bit foreign but you will soon be knocking out articles with ease.

It turns out of course it was not so much of a price freeze but a price cap as many agents who were below the prevailing price at that time were still increased to the higher price. Some people reported that because of an extra increase in September 2008 their number of actual prices rises didn’t actually reduce. All this means  the great gift of a price freeze in February 2009 was not as good as realestate.com.au would have you believe.

During the past year many of realestate.com.au’s add-on products have continued to increase at an amazing rate.  In August 2008 you could get a  Feature Property for $75. In the past 15 months we have seen three prices rises so that a feature property now costs an incredible $105.  Email is suppose to be free right? Not at realestate.com.au where ebrochures will actually cost you close to double of what it would to physically post a letter.

So the traditional subscription increase is back on the cards for February 2010 but can realestate.com.au justify an increase?

Lets look at a few things before we answer that.

Industry Performance

The industry has had a very bad year during 2009. Reports coming out of many of the real estate groups as they all completed their yearly awards were that many offices have experienced revenue drops of 40 to 60%.

In the midst of so much economic uncertainty people have decided to stay put and just “see what happens” when in the past they would have moved or relocated. As sales started to climb as the year rolled on another problem has reared its head and that’s a lack of salable stock. The listings are just not coming in fast enough for most agents.

Google openly shares some of its search analytics which provides us with an amazing overview of the levels of real estate interest on the web. Traditionally real estate interest on the web has 4 separate peaks every year. The biggest in January, then another around March, another around the end of the financial year and then there is the all important Spring peak. Its the spring peak where appraisal and listings numbers soar that stocks the larder for the post Christmas rush.

Here is the Google Insights graph for the Real Estate Category and as you can see the 2009 year is very different from past years.  There is no peak around March and even worse the Spring traffic actually dropped!

But that’s the industry as a whole.. what about realestate.com.au’s actual performance?

As any agent knows every month we get an update from the company with a new and added spin on why realestate.com.au is performing better than the past and better than their opposition.

The topic of Realestate.com.au stats was raised again in August and kicked off some interesting debate. During many phone calls Realestate.com.au was adamant that their figures were monthly uniques and even “suggested” that I run all articles I post on them  through their office for checking first…. YEAH RIGHT!

At the heart of the matter was realestate.com.au (and others) changing metrics they receive from their analytics company and renaming them as “Property Seekers”. This implies that these are people when nothing could be further from the truth.

After repeatedly asking for confirmation on their position to be provided in writing the realestate.com.au PR machine eventually provided me with an email that claimed  ”“We report on monthly unique browsers, not daily unique visitors.”

Now it got interesting… as Neilsen’s themselves decided to wade into the mix and confirmed that “the official metric that Nielsen uses to determine rankings in Market Intelligence (our cookie centric product) is actually “Average Daily Unique Browsers”.

One of the big problems I raised with the figures was cookie deletion caused figures to be exaggerated. Neilsen’s also commented on this with “That is not to say we do not report the monthly unique browsers for clients (for some it is an accurate figure due to their low frequency of visitation which means cookie deletion doesn’t have an effect) it is just that we acknowledge they are potentially overstated (especially in websites that have frequent visitation) due to cookie deletion and use from multiple locations”.

So in short,  Neilsens official metric is worked on Average Daily Unique Browsers  but they also do provide monthly figures however in websites with frequent visitation the monthly figures are potentially overstated.  Which one realestate.com.au change to be “property seekers” is still not clear  but if it is monthly as they contend then Neilsens has confirmed that the higher the number of repeat visitors the higher the overstating of the figures would be.

Regardless of what figures are used I contend that the use of the word “Property Seekers” is misleading and pure marketing spin. During a phone call I received from a realestate.com.au PR rep I asked why they changed the name to “Property Seekers” and the response I got was that stats needed to be “dumbed down” for agents to understand.

It should not be any surprise that agents can’t trust the portals own performance statistics.  In our area we have 11 local agencies and over the course of the last 12 months 8 of those agencies have claimed to be the market leader.  Puffery and boasting is one thing, I would just like to see better transparency on offer for the statistics they quote. Dumb them down but refrain from twisting the definitions and  provide the full data for those that don’t need the simpler version.

So how is the performance of realestate.com.au really going right now?

Using Google Trends for Websites we can see that not surprisingly realestate.com.au traffic has dropped significantly over the past 12 months.

Another metric that comes into play is the number of enquiries that the portal generates but that is not an easy figure to get a hold of.  Each office should look at their own enquiry levels  but I would think that with the industry traffic down and realestate.com.au’s traffic down that the vast majority of agents would also be experiencing drops in the number of enquiries from all portals including realestate.com.au.

So What Increase Can They Justify?

Realestate.com.au have been rolling out a few changes recently but nothing adds value and in fact many people will argue that their feature set has gone backwards.  Agents contact details are no no longer on display so when a potential buyer prints the browser page there is no easy way to contact the agent and those agents with a standard subscription now no longer have their salespersons details on display.

In fact the whole concept of a premium subscription has gone out the window with 85% of agents now on premium.  This means that premium is now the standard and this has created that many feature properties in popular suburbs that when combined with the 200 property limit for searches  and high levels of property under contract it is possible for a non feature property listing to last only a matter of days in suburb based searches.

The changes made to the phone numbers are trying to detect when a visitor looks for the phone details. It does not take too much stretching of the imagination to see that realestate.com.au is going to use this information to justify the next price increase.

Many people will probably argue the should not increase their subscription fees at all … but costs go up.. so I could understand an increase up to the current inflation levels but if we see an  increase with double digits like previous years I would not want to be one of the realestate.com.au account managers on the frontline.  Life for them will get real difficult real quick as they are the ones who often bear the brunt of agents frustrations. Maybe they should be given danger pay!!

Still, all in all I am pretty sure they will not hike the price as much as Domain tried on us this year. We cancelled our Domain subscription when they wanted to increase their subscription for our office by 170%… and that’s not a typo. That’s an INCREASE of 170% so nearly three times what we were paying before.

This article is about how Australian Real Estate Agents can apply basic SEO principals to the existing pages on their website by changing body text, page title, page description and alt text.

There are so many different Content Management Systems used by agents to manage their websites so its impossible for me to give you specific instructions on how to implement every thing in this article but with some commonsense, logic and a sprinkling of using the help files and program support you should be able to figure everything out fairly easily.

This article is the fourth in a 6 part series to assist agents in improving the SEO of their own websites.

The first article covered getting ready to apply changes to your website.  The second article covered link and referrer building, The third article covered keyword research.

I suggest that if you have not read the first three articles that you do that first. This article will cover optimising the current pages on your website to keywords you identified in article three.

With real estate agent websites there are two different types of pages, the  property pages which are generated automatically by the system to show off your your property listings and then there is the content pages. Most systems will allow you to edit and create new content pages yourself and this article is about you editing  your current pages to inject a bit more search engine friendliness into them.  In the next article we will discuss new pages or sections you can add to your site.

The content pages are the most likely to appear in the search engine and to generate you traffic. The property pages are generally filled automatically into a template and you will probably have very little control over them and they change regularly.

Improving your property pages is certainly an option but you will normally need to update  the template and that will generally be above the skill level of most agents and their staff. If you identify that your property pages could be improved as well you should speak with your website provider to update your templates.  Any changes to the template would automatically roll out to all property pages in one hit.

You should work through each of the existing pages on your website and refresh and  improve them one by one.

First Things First!

The first step you need to do is identify the keywords for each page.  From the keywords you identified in Article 3 select between 1 and 3 keywords that each of your existing content pages are about. On a very large site you might have individual pages targeting just one keyword but for now applying 2 or sometimes three related keywords on one page should give you the widest coverage with what you have as most agents have very few content pages on their website.

Make sure the keywords are related and best explain what the page is about. Don’t worry if you don’t have enough content pages to match up with all your keywords as in Article 4 we will discuss creating new pages for your website.

For a suburb profile  on the suburb of Nerang I might select the keywords “Nerang Real Estate” and “Nerang Property”.

Key Areas to Improve on Each Page

To improve the SEO on a particular page there are a few key areas we need to look at:-

• Page Title
• Meta Description
• Meta Keywords
• Body Content
• Images

Page Title

The single most important factor that will influence your SEO is the page title. By default some CMS systems that agents use will apply the same page title for every page.  This is a huge problem and something you need to sort out asap. The quickest way to check out all of your page titles at the moment is to use Google Search.

If you search using the site: operator you will see all the pages in Google’s index for that domain. So searching site:rwm.com.au shows us that every page is unique for the Richardson and Wrench Mosman site. As a side note if anybody had any doubts that Robert had 2000 pages on his site this search confirms that Google has a touch under 1900 of those pages indexed.

If all yours page titles are the same and if you find that you cannot change the page title you really need to consider moving or upgrading your web provider.

The page title is so powerful that no matter what you search, chances are that the majority of the pages returned on the first page will have the term you searched for in the page title. Your page title should then naturally feature the keyword or keywords you are targeting for that specific page.

The other things page title’s do is attract the persons attention on the search results page. A good page title will help get you higher on the page but a great page title will  better convey that you have what the searcher is looking for and provide a call to action and get them to click on your page over the others.

The biggest problem most people make is trying to target too many subjects on one page. This just saturates the page as far as the search engines are concerned and your theme on the page does not stand out amongst all the clutter. Keep each page focussed on just one subject. Obviously on the home page you should be targeting the name of your agency above all else with references to each suburb in your primary trade.

Using the same Nerang Suburb Profile example from above I would suggest something like :

Nerang Real Estate -  View Information on all Nerang Property

Notice how I did not use the name of the agency on that page title. That is optional and in most cases I would suggest you don’t do that on the majority of your pages. Even though the search engines will look at longer titles they will only show the first 70 characters on the search engines results page. Google also seem to only include the first 12 words of the title in the intitle: site operator. This means that you should use these two figures as your limit when crafting your page titles and if you want to put your company/agency name in the title then put it at the end.’

Nerang Real Estate -  View Information on all Nerang Property – First National Real Estate Nerang

Meta Description

The meta description is also very important but not as much as it use to be. Search engines use to rely very heavily on the meta description to work out what the page was about but webmasters worked out how to abuse this so its importance has been reduced in recent years. But one thing has remained unchanged and that is the meta description is generally, but not always, selected by search engines to display on the search engine results page as a snapshot of the content on the site.

This means that on top of having SEO value crafting a good meta description is important to entice visitors to click on your website.

Different search engines will display different number of characters but since Google is the smallest and is the major player then you should be guided by their 160 character limit.

The meta description should follow these rules

• Contain your keywords
• Inform the user what they will find on the page
• Be unique

For our example a good description depending upon what you actually have on your suburb profile might be :

The Nerang suburb profile includes info on Nerang real estate including suburb details, demographics, property types and recent Nerang property prices achieved

Meta Keywords

Meta keywords use to be very important but they have lost most of their power.  Google in fact have openly declared they do not use them at any stage anymore but  since other search engines still potentially use them and it is very easy and quick to do with no downside at all it’s important to add them to each page.

This is really a simple matter of adding the keywords you have identified for that page plus I would also add in the reverse if they are valid so for our example this would be”

nerang real estate, nerang property, real estate nerang, property nerang

Body Content

The body content is just the content on what is on the page and that is really up to you but there should be a few rules you should follow.

• Use your keywords naturally in the content. The days of stuffing keywords throughout the page is really gone. It may still effect some of the smaller search engines but the ones you want to target are not fooled by this anymore and if they consider you are spamming the page with your keywords you will probably get penalised for it.
• Your page sections should be marked with Headings or a H tags.   Header tags come in different levels. If you look at this article the page title is a H1 heading tag, the section headings are H2 tags and the sub section headings are h3 tags.  Include your keywords as much as possible in the headings tags
• Many search engines are believed to look at the readability of the content. I think it is more about the maths involved than if the actual words make sense.  Good easy to read content seems to follow a similar formula.  There are a few ways they do including looking at the number of paragraphs, the number of sentences per paragraph, the number of words per sentence. They also look at the complexity of the words you use.  When the search engines do this paragraphs containing masses of keywords are quickly identified as spam.  This means its important to  use good grammar and structure to your content and refrain from using complex words. Don’t make sentences or paragraphs too big or even too small. Make it easier to read for a visitor and that will make it easier to read for a search engine. You should really be able to tell just by looking at it but to test the readability of your pages you can use one of the many online tools like http://www.read-able.com/
• You should bold keywords and other import information on the page at least once or twice when they appear in your page’s body content.  Bold works with the search engines just like it does to a reader and highlights important words as being particularly relevant. Don’t bold every instance you use your keywords or go overboard in anyway. It needs to look natural

Images

Images are something often overlooked by real estate agents. In general each page should contain at least one image. Pages with longer content should include even more.  Pages with images generally make it much easier for a visitor to read by breaking up all that text but additionally for a search engine they also add further context to the page’s content.

Rename the photos to the keywords for that page and upload them to the website and insert them on the page. You then need to set the alt text for each image on the page. The alt text describes the image and again you insert your keywords. Search engines use the name of the image files and the alt text when analysing just what your page content is about.

Other Factors You Need to Consider.

There are a range of other factors you need to consider when looking to optimise your pages. These include :

• Bounce  and Satisfaction Rates
• Page Load Time
• Internal and External Links

Bounce and Satisfaction Rates

Google has recently advised that in order to gain more relevance on their results it will be placing more emphasis on bounce and/or satisfaction rates for each page.

A bounce rate is the percentage of all users who view only that page and then leave without viewing anything else on your site. The satisfaction rate approaches the issue from the opposite end of the spectrum but in a slightly different way. The satisfaction rate is the percentage of people who find the information they were actually searching for on the page they visited.  This means that satisfaction rate will indicate how many people clicked on your link and were satisfied with the results without having to return to return to Google and perform any further searches.

In essence what Google is saying is that the higher the bounce rate for a page, the less important it must be for that term and the higher the satisfaction rate the more relevant it is for that particular keyword.

This places a high importance on making sure your visitors arriving from search engines, or at least Google, do not return to the search engine and instead they look further into your site. Increasing your site’s “stickyness” in keeping visitors on the site longer and looking at more pages will be more important than ever. Make sure in the first paragraph of your text is inviting and explains exactly what the page is about. With Google at least everyone that leaves your site unsatisfied is a potential black mark and those that continue to browse and read through your site is a tick.

Page Load Time

Google has indicated recently that page load times will play a role in determining your ranking. Selecting a high quality web host and minimising your page load time will soon play a role in just where you rank in the search engine.  In re-designing the pages the biggest way you can minimise page load times is to make sure the images you use on each page are small and optimised for the web.

There are a lot of tools out there that can check your page load time but here is one http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

Internal and External Links

You need to include links into your page body content that link to other pages on your site and to other external sites. Google uses these in there ranking plus they will make visitors burrow further increasing your satisfaction rates.  External links can be made to open in a new browser window meaning the visitor will not actually browse away from your site should they click on an external link. Using our example of  the Nerang suburb profile you might include a paragraph like this:

Nerang is very centrally located on the Gold Coast and is a popular choice for working couples and young families. Nerang real estate prices start from $220,000 for a 2 bedroom unit and $350,000 for a 3 bedroom house but quickly rise to well over $1 million for prestige executive residences and acreage properties outside of the residential area. Recognised as one of the most affordable suburbs on the Gold Coast but still within 15 minutes drive to the beaches, Nerang property is also very popular with First Home Buyers and local and out of town investors.

This content uses our keywords in the context of the page but we can also provide a range of internal and external links to the reader throughout the content such as

Nerang is very centrally located on the Gold Coast and is a popular choice for working couples and young families. Nerang real estate prices start from $220,000 for a 2 bedroom unit and $350,000 for a 3 bedroom house but quickly rise to well over $1 million for prestige executive residences and acreage properties outside of the residential area. Recognised as one of the most affordable suburbs on the Gold Coast but still within 15 minutes drive to the beaches, Nerang property is also very popular with First Home Buyers and local and out of town investors.

Peppering links to other pages on your own site and occasionally other external sites will improve your seo and will keep visitors on your site longer and enable them to engage better with your site. If you are worried about external links allowing visitors to leave your site then you easily have them open a new browser window so they dont actually navigate away from your site.

Overview

So as you work through updating your current content pages create yourself a checklist to make sure you look at every one of these factors

• Page Title
• Meta Description
• Meta Keywords
• Body Content
  • Keywords in Content
  • Header Tags
  • Readability
  • Bolding Keywords
• Images
• Bounce  and Satisfaction Rates
• Page Load Time
• Internal and External Links

If you ensure you look at and improve each of these factors on all your content pages then you are well on your way to improve your seo and getting more traffic.  If you have a quite a few pages to get through spread them out and dont try and do them all at once. Remember you only have to do that once and the benefit lasts for a very long time. Thats why SEO is one of the best investments you can do for your website.

Additional Reading

SEO Explained For Small Business Owners

SEO at Wikipedia

Google’s Webmaster Guidelines

And lastly something that I have only just found myself and if you are just learning about SEO is the most important thing you will read on the subject because it is written by Google themselves

Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide

New Suburb Profiles

The new suburb profiles provide additional sales data on each suburb including monthly and annual median house data, supply and demand trends and local sales data. Much of the data is obviously been sourced from RPData through their renewed commercial relationship. The supply and demand trends seem to be the exception and calculated from realestate.com.au intelligence comparing the number of buyers looking in an area relative to the number of available properties.

Much of this information is nothing new and Domain certainly provide much of this information in their suburb profile but the realestate.com.au new offering is certainly more polished than their competitor and the demand trends are unique.

Of course the new Suburb Profiles act as a teaser to upsell additional reports also available for the consumer at an extra cost. These reports would provide an additional revenue stream for both companies as they split the proceeds.

These suburbs are linked back to listings in the Realestate.com.au Sold Database which allows for agents to get better mileage out of this data.  There seems to be no allowance to preference your own sales and you can’t opt out. Agents who control most of the sales in suburbs could see a huge boost as their sales gain more visibility to consumers throughout the site.

Once all the suburb profiles have been rolled out expect to see a link from the homepage so visitors can go straight into a directory of all suburbs rather than having to find a property first..

Local Voices

The most significant change however is the new Local Voices service which is a pretty radical move by realestate.com.au but the first thing to remember is that it is nothing new. Local voices is simply a rebranding of the Street Advisor service through a new partnership deal between the businesses. So whilst this has been around for quite awhile now the realestate.com.au connection will ensure its exposure level to Australian consumers will increase exponentially over coming weeks and months.

This morning the Street Advisor (www.streetadvisor.com.au) site is redirected to its new home http://localvoices.realestate.com.au however somebody made a small typing error in the redirection and even after a full business day it is still broken and pointing to http://localvoices.realestate.com.u/ instead of http://localvoices.realestate.com.au.

This is all a bit embarrassing that it has not been picked up immediately. You would think the first thing someone would do after redirecting a major site would be to make sure it works because it has meant that the whole Street Advisor site has been out of commission for the whole day. Since the public dont really know the local voices web address yet it has not been a great day one.

Local voices allows consumers to rate individual streets and suburbs and to interact with each other asking questions of locals. The local voices system will feature the an overall rating for the suburb, what the suburb is great for, Who the locals have recommended would enjoy living in the suburb and Links to read and write reviews

The potential for abuse has been well spoken about on this site already but realestate.com.au has decided to integrate a mature system into their site rather than creating their own which should minimise any risks as most of the kinks should already been ironed out. Agents have the potential to really leverage this system by working to become a local expert in their area by providing street and suburb reviews.

As local voices is integrated into all listings on the realestate.com.au portal the fact that proactive agents are going to leverage exposure as the local expert on other agents listings is going to be a sore point for many who dont have the skills to take advantage of it or who cant be bothered. The realestate.com.au team have will no doubt have procedures in place to deal with agent complaints but dont expect too much interference and editorial control over the reviews unless they are factually incorrect, breach anothers copyright or are defamatory in nature. This is certainly how other such review systems work and the best way to counter a “bad” review is to write a better and more detailed “good” review.

A really good example of Local Voices  is Doncaster East http://localvoices.realestate.com.au/search/doncaster+east

Overall

Overall the updates seem like a good thing. There is bound to be a few bugs and issues to iron out like the redirection problem but it should not take long to sort itself out. Agents will have to do a bit of work to ensure they get the most out of these systems. Both the new Suburb Profiles and Local Voices open up additional marketing and promotional opportunties for successful and proactive agents but where there is winners there will also be losers.

They are not going to go away and will probably be very popular with consumers so Real Estate agents should develop and implement a strategy to get the most out of these new systems. Become your local area expert on Local Voices before your opposition does and ensure all your sales are recorded properly in the realestate.com.au sold database.

So what do you think of the two new features?

Well it was with some shock that opening up Saturday’s edition of the Gold Coast Bulletin and I found Fox’s Real Estate, a fully fledged Jenman Approved agency  advertising 10 Clinton Street, Labrador as an auction for sale.

It all seems pretty hypocritical to me but is that really surprising?

Unfortunately this raises a few unanswered questions.

So is Jenman now Auction friendly? Are we about to see Jenman join the ranks of the Auction brigade?

Should the owner of this property be concerned that the agent selling their home actually believes that they will get less during this method?

Does anybody know any other Jenman Approved agencies conducting Auctions?

Will Today Tonight run a story on this change of heart ?

******************* UPDATE   13th of November *********************

The auction is tomorrow at 1pm and because of Jenman’s hypocritical stand it has generated lots of interest in the real estate industry including the media.

More and more questions are being asked about this auction:-

1. Which auctioneer is going to become the first Jenman approved auctioneer?
2. What is the banks response to Jenman’s comment that “Anyone who knows anything about real estate knows that banks and mortgagees often don’t care about the price – they just want it sold and out of the way.”
3. As a self described Consumer Advocate will Jenman pay the shortfall out of his own pocket to the consumer in this story who  is going to be held responsible for the shortfall between his mortgage and the sales price because Jenman and the agent has openly admitted that the auction cannot get the highest possible price?
4. Will the bank concerned confirm or deny that they “insisted” on a Jenman agent auctioning the property like Neil Jenman states.  What is the TRUTH Mr Jenman?
5. When will the other Jenman agents start handling auctions?

Kevin Turner from RE Uncut has been conducting a range of interviews on the subject covering the story. I believe that neither Jenman, the salesperson or the principal are answering Kevin’s request for interview at the moment but quite a few people involved are. If anybody has Neil’s personal contact details and would like to share them it would be appreciated.

I think it’s incredible when a media whore gets shy when the subject turns back to himself in anything but a positive light. Maybe the cameras and a journalist will be chasing him down the road getting into his car zooming off.  With  his own personal experience  he is probably worried that his comments might be heavily edited and taken out of context and sensationalized like his  targets often claim.

Kevin will be running the story at  www.reuncut.com next Thursday and Friday and we will update the blog with the auction result over the weekend.

**************UPDATE*************

Unfortunately I did not return from Brisbane in time to make the Auction on the day but someone who was there has advised that they had 3 or 4 bidders with bidding starting at $300,000. The property was announced on the market at $550,000 and eventually sold at $600,000. I have not had a chance to double check the figures but this must give the Jenman group a 100% closure rate on their Auctions.