Property Management site apmasphere have just announced the launch of aTV, property management’s first ever video channel. “aTV is dedicated to making learning on the job easier and more enjoyable – at any stage of your career.”
“aTV will provide the demonstration of key functions in the property management industry.”
The premise with aTV has been built around 100 questions the legislation and software can not teach or answer for a property manager.
aTV plan to keep the videos very short and intend to present a lot more insights along the way.
Membership to the apmasphere site is free & aTV is the latest in their long list of FREE resources for property managers to help them with their careers.
As a member, I’ve found that apmasphere provide an invaluable resource for Property Managers & Principals, with some of the industries best Property Managers & Property Management trainers providing guidance, thoughts and ideas on how to overcome many of the daily issues Property Management departments & Principals face.
Apmasphere has in excess of 1,000 members & provides some of the most up-to-date information available for Property Managers. Their forum acts like a brains trust for ideas on the ‘How To’ of Property Management and approaches questions on economics, structure and growth.
If you haven’t joined in as yet, you may want to head over to see what you’re missing out on. It’s a great online learning platform.
Newspapers are on the decline! A very fast decline. Readership and revenues are down and profits seem very hard to find anymore. Because of that decline agents appear to be dropping their support of print media a little bit more every year. Read the rest of this article »
Will the recent launch of the Apple iPad mean the end of the Listing Presentation Folder or FlipChart style presentation? Will we see agents showing off their listings via the iPad? Or perhaps they’ll be using it to watch real estate training sessions or live streamed sales meetings? Either way, could it be a Game Changer? Read the rest of this article »
Remember the iconic 1980s movie ‘Wall Street’ in which Michael Douglas walks along a beach watching the sun rise while talking into his mobile phone? The thing was about as big as his head (which was big), yet was the symbol of power, wealth, technology and cool. Looking back at it now, the device forces a smile, just like those beige box-like floppy drive PCs of the same era.
Fast forward nearly a quarter of a century, and the current generation of mobile phones are really pocket PCs, things that might have impressed Flash Gordon or Captain Kirk in earlier eras. We check our emails, surf the web, listen to music, take pictures, download and pay for apps – from anywhere. It slips into our pocket, we own it, it’s ours. With the iPhone, it’s stylish to be a geek, and if you’re a newcomer to all this, welcome to the party.
A year ago, mobile traffic to web sites, and real estate sites in particular, did not rate. Yet already 23% of Australians with mobiles use them to access the internet, even though total internet traffic is estimated to be less than 1% through a mobile device (ABS). Still early days.
Part of this could be the catch up of consumers, part of this could be the lack of mobile-ready websites and the small number of ‘real estate’ apps in the iphone App Store. A recent search of “real estate” apps turned up only 5 Australian ones (plenty of American), among these a couple of multi-office real estate agencies, and among the main portals only Domain are present.
In the States, Zillow.com were reported as saying up to 35% of their weekend traffic comes from mobile devices. Pete Flint, CEO of Trulia.com, claims (more believably) their mobile traffic is in the “5 to 10% range”, while a year ago “it was negligible”. Although iphones account for only 8% of our mobile devices, 50% of mobile traffic is coming from iphone apps. Realestate.com.au, in Australia, reported “exponential growth” to its mobile site in December (150,000 unique visitors), claiming this to be “additional” traffic.
Whatever the claims and stats being bandied about, it would appear that mobile is going to be the trend of 2010. Social media is “…like, so 2009”.
It makes intuitive sense that mobile traffic should figure more this year – the technology is here, you can be walking down that beach watching the sunrise and getting your real estate fix. There are apps being developed where you point your camera phone at a building and can see which properties are for sale, at what price and what has sold recently. Househunting is an activity that still takes us out and about, checking into home opens, trawling suburbs in our cars, walking down streets. With the mobile in our pocket, do we really need anything else?
So get ready for the upsurge of mobile web designers and iphone app developers. (There will be snake oil salesmen among them.) And with that, the question – do we “mobilise” our web site or get an iphone app developed, or both, or neither? The former allows your site to be accessible on most, if not all net-ready mobiles (much more fiddly to have coded than you might think). The latter allows people to download your app, have it in their menu making it easily accessible. Apps are sexy and cool, great PR spin, but are more expensive to develop. And how do you get YOUR app downloaded, especially when (in say a year or two’s time) there are hundreds of Australian real estate apps in the iStore, rather than 5? This is the brave new world we seem to be moving into.
http://www.goldcoastforsale.tv Or. The questions, and issues surrounding aggregating ‘content’ and giving new relevance to old media.
A lot us talk about doing stuff. And certainly there’s a 101 great ideas for shows of all types and sizes on property. I’ve had about a dozen myself.
But there’s a country mile between the talking and the doing.
The ‘doing’ is called going ‘the extra mile’ – and there’s not a lot of traffic on it.
Which is why I raise my ‘cowboy’ hat to a guy called Shane Gore, who’s managed to pull together a two-hour show on Gold Coast real estate – with rates, Shane explains, that go head-to-head with The Gold Coast Bulletin.
I don’t understand media buying, as I’m not in that game. So I can’t comment.
But any exercise in draining VPA from ‘The Establishment’ is not going to make for a very happy camping ground.
It has taken Shane about three years to pull it off; and he’s done so by looking at all the content suppliers on the Gold Coast, and then, very gracefully and creatively ‘pimping’ all of our services; mashing them up in a very GC show – that’s being posted by the super slick operations of BlackLab and Cutting Edge.
And these outfits are VERY SUPER BROADCAST SLICK. No doubt about that.
Plus. I use the word ‘pimping’ in, actually, a very complimentary fashion.
And no doubt Shane will take great exception to the term. But I was ‘pimped’ before I knew it, as a lot of content was downloaded from the Internet and cut into a ‘pilot’.
Without our knowledge. But there’s no great gain without a great risk.
And I like Shane and what he’s trying to do.
I’ve even signed my Non Disclosures and my Copyright waivers; and supplied copies of the $21 million in public liability insurance we need to operate in public as property ‘video’ shooters.
In fact, I have never been ‘pimped’ any better, in what is the ultimate exercise in aggregating existing content and re-purposing it for what I reckon is a dead duck medium.
And that’s TV. Closely followed by newspapers. Its a rolling bet which line of dominoes falls first.
Short of the next series of UNDERBELLY on Nine, I see nothing compelling about what’s on offer on TV anymore.
TV needs all the help it can get. I mean it IS there. We turn it ON. But it is still an idiot box.
Concepts like Shane’s that can bridge the gap and drive viewers to portals are interesting.
In fact. I wish I’d thought of GOLD COAST FOR SALE myself but I’m still very much in the bridge-mending or bridge-building stages, between myself and various competitors, so I can attempt to deliver some impartial postings – post the controversial ‘Banning Adjectives in Property’.
Shane approached most of the content suppliers on the Coast; from those offering the dreaded ‘Ken Burns Slide Show’ – which is not video, despite the fact it happens to be ‘moving’ (while anything and everything in the frame itself remains ‘still’) – and most of the digital cinematographers specializing in property.
From the GC to Brisbane.
The good. The bad. And the ugly.
I’m supporting GOLD COAST FOR SALE and we’ve licensed about three years of Gold Coast HD lifestyle for this new series.
The Burning Questions:
Will two-hours of Gold Coast real estate ‘rate’ on a Sunday morning? I’ve personally lost half a million investing in a series called JUST FOR THE RECORD on Ten. Which didn’t. The Comedy Company got my slot and the rest was history.
And will it sell property?
These are two real hard hurdles to jump.
If GOLD COAST FOR SALE can clear them, the ground rules will change.
Whilst Rupert Murdoch may extol the brilliance of his newspapers journalism, however his history and facts really tell a different story. Over the past decade newspapers across the globe including Rupert’s have culled journalists from their payroll amid cost blowouts and shrinking readerships. It is not uncommon these days for one journalist to have 5 roles within the one newspaper.
Meet reporter John Brinkwater, Motoring Expert, Religious Affairs Reporter, Political Correspondent, Pet Expert and Love Guru.
How funny it is that Rupert and the newspaper industry will now turn to the same journalistic stocks and plead with them to save their companies. We will now see the newspaper industry invest in generations of reporters- apparently giving you stories you will want to pay for – I just love the irony of it all.
A war has erupted and it is being fought across the newspapers of the world and also in senate hearings. It is a war that the commercial newspapers, radio and television networks have a invested a lot of time in debating. But have they got a chance of changing the dynamic of the way we read news and watch television?
I have been spending the last few weeks researching my second article on ‘newspapers and the online world‘ but will not release this until next week now, as this issue deserves an article on its own. Lets have a little look at what this is all about. Read the rest of this article »
This past decade we have seen many markets rocked by the digital era, none more so than the news & entertainment industry. We only have to look at our own lifestyles to know just how much has changed. The demands we place on what we read, watch and listen to – are quite astoundingly different compared to only a few years ago.
Sadly however, the people that have run these industries from the top always seem to be clueless as to what the future holds. I will read with interest the changes new Fairfax Chairman, Roger Corbett makes in his first 3 months in charge or if he just takes a ’steady as she goes’ approach. In my opinion he has to immediately show he has got something to offer and he has to get creative .
In the first of a two part series I am going to take a look at The Print Newspaper both here in Australia and also in The USA where I am currently located. In Australia we have two major real estate newspapers, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age these are both controlled by Fairfax.
The second part of this series to be released this time next week will focus on the future of online newspapers.
The Boardroom
We have a management problem, boardrooms are filled with people that have a good record of running traditional companies or companies that have made the digital transition easily. However, the majority of boardrooms today are filled with people that are not qualified to understand the digital age and the behavior of their own market in this digital age.
In the beginning it was much easier to launch a jobs, cars or houses website if you had an established classifieds newspaper to get it off the ground. Realestate.com.au was not saved by investment from News Ltd (although it helped) , it was the aggressive push through their newspapers and property guides from News Ltd (and a slack competitor) that established its success.
Today it is nearly impossibly to run a newspaper if you do not have strong jobs, cars and houses website in each of the key markets. Newspapers can no longer survive without the online world!
For an established newspaper to change, it has to start at the top. If the stories of Roger Corbett are true, then he must change his attitude or he will be remembered as the Chairman who sank Fairfax. The man has had great success in the past and I cannot see how at his age and with his bank account, he could not want more, than to make the changes needed in his own headspace to make this work.
You cannot be successful if you think that the newspaper market will get back to normal levels once the economy picks up; or if your only other idea is to wait for other Internet companies to succeed and then purchase them at inflated prices; or if you invest more in marketing and less in your journalistic talent; or think more tabloid news stories will appeal to the masses!
You have to understand that what is broken cannot be fixed in the same ways you have attempted to fix them in the past.
Yesterdays News
I love newspapers, I read them every single day. Actually, let me clarify, I read the news everyday, but I rarely buy newspapers.
The reason I do not buy newspapers is fairly simple, and is summed up in the following statement.
When was the last time a real news story broke in a newspaper, before it broke online?
You, like me cannot think of one recent event. If you are using an RSS reader (like me) and get your news delivered this way, you probably hear about the news before anyone in a newspaper newsroom hears about it. Even better Twitter (and the right accompanying application) will get it to you quicker.
Yesterdays News
Let us look at the first issue, news. The first time I really thought it was over for newspapers was when Saddam Hussein’s rein ended. I remember reading the headlines outside a newsagent in Hobart, Tasmania almost 24 hours after it happened, as if it just happened! Remember that statue coming down? This is the papers biggest problem, it cannot scoop news, so it tries to make up news.
Michael Jackson dies and for 2 weeks we have a different headline each day, each one trying to out do the previous. This is not news, it isn’t even interesting, you don’t create news – you find it – and you cannot find it unless you grow your journalists and give them the freedom and time to search for it.
The Classifieds
Once upon a time we read a newspaper to look for a job, a house, a car, a garage sale or a classified. You purchased the Trading Post to look for a bargain and you may have even looked at advertising for a coupon to take to Coles or Woollies.
Classifieds will never return, they will continue to shrink and someone will have to do the maths one day on whether it is worthwhile to run the wretched things in print.
Classifieds are now almost exclusively online, so there must be a conduit between the print version which should be about stories and statistics, to the online which should be the classifieds and even more statistics.
Subscriptions
The price of a daily newspaper is dirt cheap, yet fewer people are willing to pay for it. In Australia, I purchased Wired and Fast Company magazines each month. I loved these magazines, but air freighted and at $16 an issue it was ridiculous, but I still paid for it. Since I arrived in the USA and have an address here, I have subscribed to both magazines at a total cost of $19.80 for 24 issues!
Surely these companies lose money? I think you have already guessed why they do it. Their thinking is that they make the purchase so cheap that it makes common sense to just subscribe – even for the casual buyer, the losses on delivery are minimal and are offset by the increase in advertising revenues. Lifting your guaranteed monthly subscriptions, lifts your total guaranteed readership and impresses potential advertisers.
This is exactly what newspapers need to do. They can keep their newsstand price the same, but run promotions for $9.95 per annum where you can get the newspaper delivered to your door 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Anything more than $19.95 per annum is not an impulse buy and therefore will not work.
There are many ways you can offset this price, increases in advertisers, bundling other companies leaflets, flyers etc.
The Rockstar Journalists
We only have to look at the current stocks of young journalists to know just how sad a situation we are in. Gone are the days of journalists dedicating months to a story and cracking a scandal, the majority are now relegated to press releases or are so tied up covering so many stories, that they have no time to actual do any real beat reporting. Many journalists now have too many job titles and business cards that it is laughable.
Examples
Political Correspondent James Worthy
Youth with James ‘JimmyW’ Worthy
Yachting Expert James Worthy
Lawn Bowls with James Worthy
Ask James
Religious Affairs with Brother James
We are about to enter a new era of the rockstar journalist. These are the same journalists that we read today, but newspapers will be making them into rockstars. Even though the first stage will be shallow, I believe that the newspapers across the globe will need to get back to breeding stars, beat journalists and real local content.
Sure, we have some good journalists in the political arena, an almost endless supply of financial experts, plenty of celebrity style journalists and some that provide us with a running commentary on social issues from both sides such as Peter Fitzsimons and Miranda Devine, both of whom are excellent writers, but are more social commentators than true investigative journalists.
I am talking about beat journalists, a breed who follow a lead for months/years, who give us real gritty local and national impact stories and every now and then crack a conspiracy – journalists that know it is a mortal sin to end any scandal with the word ‘gate’.
A newspaper should provoke a discussion in the workplace and around the nations dinner tables and only beat journalism can do that!
Newspapers are facing slow death and I think only the true beat journalist can save them. Michael Moore has some interesting comments on the death of newspapers. It comes in at 21 minute mark if you want to jump straight to it.
Design
Jacek Utko, is a newspaper designer, he has had some great success in lifting circulation. Newspapers are boring and they need a re-design, it will not make all the difference, but it is all part of the new solution. You can also read an interview with Jacek here.
Watch this February 2009 Ted Talk by Jacek.
Distribution
I currently live in Boston, where you have the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald, each one of these companies have their own set of delivery trucks. The cost of delivering newspapers does not have to be so high. Come together, open your network up to other local newspapers and periodicals, where you actually make money from the distribution.
Do Newspapers still matter?
I love newspapers, I think they can still survive, they will never thrive like before, that is because the classifieds ‘rivers of gold’ (jobs, cars, houses) are lost forever to the web, but they have a real relevance to a cities identity. It will be a sad day if this is lost and the blame for this will lie squarely with the owners of these media groups – who still seem to think that it is their right to control the media and not simply a time limited privilege!
Summary
It is a tough sell. I cannot see many newspapers surviving if the boardrooms just think that everything will be fine once the economy picks up. Everything from the people to design, subscriptions, distribution must change.
Next week in part two, I will talk about the future of online newspapers and provide soe great examples of what we can expect in the next generation.
Rupert Murdoch has been throwing off protectionist rants of late to pretty much anybody that will listen. On the one hand I admire the guy for building an empire and embracing the digital era, but on the other hand I wonder if he is losing his marbles.
In case you have not read my some previous articles about current day media moguls, I will repeat it here for you. Having a market share or a semi monopoly is a privilege not a right and this privilege/right is not exclusive, if you cannot adapt simply move on!
Rant One – Public Broadcasting
Rupert rolled out his son James on centre stage to deliver the MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival and launched into the BBC with an argument whose motives were was so transparent that the majority of comment outside his own networks were a collective ‘rolling of the eyes’ .
The BBC in the UK and the ABC in Australia are pretty much the only news sources (aside from perhaps SBS) that are free from commercial indulgences and interference, and for the majority of the populations of both countries, an indispensable part of our lives.
James other argument was that the private sector left to their own devices would be more innovative as the BBC. Murdoch added that the BBC stifled innovation as it made it difficult for the private sector to compete.
Would we have seen classics such as Faulty Towers, Black Adder, Top Gear, Chaser, Frontline, Summer Heights High, Kath & Kim without public broadcasting?
I am sure you ca think of dozens more classics that have come from the BBC/ABC over the years. I also consider the news and current affairs on these networks so far above that of the commercial networks that for the past few years on Australia, I rarely ever watched a commercial station – if not for sports!
James also attacked the news reporting of these networks with “Dumping free, state-sponsored news on the market makes it incredibly difficult for journalism to flourish on the internet. Yet it is essential for the future of independent journalism that a fair price can be charged for news to people who value it,” he said.
State Sponsored? You lost me there James.
In my opinion the attack is the first in a few deliberate stages and is aimed at the public perception of these organisations.
However, Rupert and James are seriously deluded if they think this attack will have any effect on public perception. The BBC in the UK costs the taxpayer around $140 pound per annum and I am sure the Australian taxpayer is slugged even less per person. Now if you look at local content in bothy countries, it is almost exclusively provided by these networks.
Rant Two – News Aggregators
Rupert has come out and continued his attack on the search engines and news aggregators, telling them the time has come to pay for News Ltd’s content. This shows a complete lack of understanding of how actual search engines and news aggregator sites work. Here is a little primer for Rupert.
Lesson- Search Engine/News Aggregator Primer
Rupert, please sit down and listen to me, no not in my chair, on the little one to the right of you. That’s right the one that is the same color as the Fire Engines.
Once upon a time there was a web page, and on that web page there were little snippets of code called ‘meta-tags’. These ‘meta-tags’ carried snippets of content to make it easier for search engines to find a page. Most programmers gave the page a ‘title’ and a ‘description’ and clever software like www.wordpress.org actually automate that process.
The really clever people with coke bottle glasses at search engines and news aggregator websites created little things that we called ‘crawler bots’ that crawled around and around the Interweb to grab the billions of new or updated articles/pages and indexed them on their sites and allows this content to be found by the millions of users each day.
If your content got selected by the user they clicked on the link and they got to your website and read that article or page. Your website had advertising on it and you made lots of money from those advertisers. The more popular your website got, the more money you made. It was like magic!
What if I don’t want to play?
Now Rupert, this is where all the incredibly gifted programmers out there on the Interweb came in. If you did not want your content indexed in search engines or on news aggregator companies like Google had a standard method by which you could prevent the ‘crawler bots’ from indexing your sites content. This way of you were not happy, you didn’t have to have your content indexed.
Now go out and play with all of the other media moguls in the pay tv tent.
Overarching Strategy
Rupert and friends perfect world would see no free public news, all bloggers discredited and everyone forced into paying for everything we read. Again after more than a digital decade we have a leader of one of the most successful companies in the world bereft of any idea on how to make the same kind of money in an almost exclusive online world.
Rupert, I like you mate, you have built one of the most successful organisations of the 20th century and for that you are in an elite minority, you have success and wealth beyond any of our wildest dreams but if bullying and protectionism is the only answer you have, then please step aside and let the next generation of digital companies take over.
Later this week I have the first of a two part series on Newspapers and how they can be saved.
When Telstra paid AUD $636 million for he Trading Post in 2004 many questioned yet another wasted acquisition for the Telco giant (the list is long). Today those questions have been vindicated as Telstra has now shut down the 22 print versions of the Trading Post to concentrate on the online edition. Another hit will come as many visitors to the website would have come from the print versions and the final blow maybe the poor structure of the Trading Post website – as only last year I attempted unsuccessfully to post a product (a free trial offer – that wasn’t actually free) and gave up after I could not work out how to post (it kept directing me to pay). So I missed out on saying the phrase ‘tell him he’s dreaming’ all because a special offer I clicked on didn’t turn out out be that special after all.
As for another ‘dreamer’ Ron Walker is trying to paint his tenure at Fairfax as a savior telling ABC PM, “If we had continued to rely on the cash flows from the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age and the Financial Review, the company wouldn’t have existed today, so, it’s paid off for us”. Yes Ron, paying $700 plus million for a ‘New Zealand only’ classifieds site saved Fairfax! Fairfax has some great opportunities but the window is closing very fast and buying up expensive digital assets that do not even cover the interest on the loan to buy that same asset is not the answer. I have no idea what Ron Walker has done in his time on the Fairfax board, but I can assure you he will not be remembered as a savior!
It truly dumbfounds me how large organisations such as Telstra, Fairfax, PBL or News Limited rarely ever create a unique product from scratch. They are all very good at buying assets at the height of the market and selling or getting out at the bottom of the market. These companies already have huge traffic to their major sites and massive databases in the classifieds arena, be it in cars, jobs, houses or general classifieds., so it should be relatively easy for them to create successful new products and increase shareholder value.
They need to get out of the habit of buying up websites for 100’s of millions of dollars and invest a few million each year in a ‘Black Ops’ style tech team to come up with new and exciting products from existing databases/systems they have.
This team should be able to tap into (read) any database and should be able to create new products from scratch without someone telling them ‘no you cannot do that, this will affect this or that’. The idea is that you create new products and test them in markets across your digital assets. This team should be able to go and meet with any division of the organisation and be granted access to any data. Yes, you must have some oversight, but that is at the end of the process, not at the beginning – if a product doesn’t fit – or is too risky – it gets shelved.
The alternative is to continue dying a slow death and live in denial. There does come a time when banks will abandon these companies or their money will run out and for some of them the only way to survive will be to do what Telstra is doing and selling off or closing down assets.
This is the digital era and web/mobile based products will be everything to these companies in less than 10 years.
Since: 11th June 2009 Company: Websites 4 Real Estate Phone: 1300 780 869
Greg Vincent is a Real Estate Coach who’s been running real estate agencies for over 20 years. He works closely with some of Australia’s greatest internet marketers & has established multiple web based businesses. Greg enjoys finding ways that real estate agents & franchise groups can build a greater profile online & generate more business by embracing technology & social media .
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