I thought this was a very interesting article by Glenn and I think it warrants a post of its own.

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A long post I know but I just got back from the First National Conference at the Hyatt Coolum resort on the Sunshine Coast.

Before I get on to the interesting bits, I must say that our network is getting a lot of things right these days. That had to be the best conference I have been to. It was full of energy, excitement and promise.

One of the speakers at the conference was Andrew Taylor, Realestate.com.au’s Industry Business Development Manager who’ session was titled, the future of the internet. Andrew is a self professed expert on our industry, but to be fair I think he means as far as internet marketing goes. I found Andrew’s talk generally very interesting, not just for what it contained, but for what was left out.

True to form, Andrew opened with the BIG REA ad, detailing all of the businesses, websites and listing their dreams of global domination. To be expected I suppose..

Andrew provided a list of what he thinks will feature on future estate sites in Australia over the next year or so. All of his suggestions were selected for shock value and as you would expect he followed up with the “These are all in place right now somewhere in the world.” The type of things raised were allowing vendors to add text and details to their properties marketing, allowing web visitors to comment on properties , agents and suburbs. Nothing shocking here, but I doubt any of this will reach the mainstream anytime soon, nor did Andrew advise that realestate.com.au was looking at any of these points.

Andrew also covered what he thought was the future for technology outside the real estate sphere which covered things like better internet and technology in the mobile platforms. I found one of his prediction quite interesting. Andrew forsees a time when you can send searches, maps and routes from your computer to your sat nav in your car. Very Interesting prediction however I just could not help myself and had to point out this was already a reality and is available in Europe with BMW and Google.

So what does Realestate.com.au see as their main threats in the near future… Wait for it… Andrew actually advised that realestate.com.au is “nervous” about Truelocal! Apparently the combination of News and Google has the potential to rival realestate.com.au. Now I don’t understand where these two companies combined forces on a product. Google used Truelocal’s business directory to populate their business section of Google Maps. Thats it as far as I knew! Andrew went on to describe how consumers could be looking for a hairdresser but might stumble upon a property listing and how powerful that could be. Honestly, I think Truelocal has a long way to go to be any kind of force.

That was the only mention of Google in his talk about future competition. As far as Andrew is concerned Google does not pose a threat on its own, only as threat because of their google maps integration with Truelocal. I don’t know if they are just ignorant or that naming Truelocal as a threat rather than Google is part of a plan to be seen as unassailable.

Thankfully his session had a lot of good stuff as well. Andrew provided stacks of statistics, but one of the most interesting one was that 32% of all unique browsers visit the sold area of realestate.com.au. I never would have dreamed that the numbers to the sold properties would be that high.

Apparently there is two portal start-ups ready to launch that will feature a recommendation engine as part of the rollout. A recommendation engine works on the basis of providing other recommended listings to view such as “previous visitors who viewed this property also viewed the following three properties”. Amazon is one of the most famous successes of a successful implementation of a recommendation engine along with ebay.

Andrew showed us the new integration of video into the realestate.com.au property pages. Basically the video replaces the main image with very small video controls underneath. I think they need to tweak this as many visitors will not realise that this is a video but think it is a normal photo image.

Andrew also advised that realestate.com.au was also looking at video and audio on major suburbs around Australia. He also admitted that the relaunch of property.com.au was based around testing how a Trulia concept would work in Australia and so far the test has proved positive. He seemed to gain pleasure in recalling the history of Trulia and how they rejected a buyout by Google .
Andrew also glossed over the Weichert Lead Network. I personally think that has more relevance to future of out industry. I first head about the lead network from Shaun, realestate.com.au GM in another presentation where a lot more importance was placed on it. More info here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtj2m4lsh_g

I had another interesting occurrence at the conference involving realestate.com.au. Whilst discussing a number of things with one of their reps she asked me about their brochure product and their feature all product. I responded advising her I would never be interested in feature all as I could not support a product that if everybody in a suburb took up we would all be back on an equal footing and realestate.com.au would be making a fortune however as the brochure product was adding something new that I was interested in looking at it further. Another attendee talking with a different rep piped up and agreed with my position and thats when things went a little crazy. The other realestate.com.au rep decided to take the comment as an attack on him personally although I have no idea why as he was not even involved in our discussion. Basically he just rudely interrupted. The display was so unprofessional and seemed to have left his colleagues dumbfounded as he went off. He actually got very aggressive and I love a debate as much as the next person but because of his aggro I could not stop laughing and I don’t think that made it any better. I honestly could not believe that a representative of any company their to push their product on attendees would act in that sort of manner.

Now this is where it got interesting… During his rants he made the statement that consumers wanted the default sort order by date. I asked how he knew this and he said that realestate.com.au surveys their visitors and agents and he has the statistics to back it up. When I asked for those statistics he went into back peddle mode. He said that to get the stats I have to go to one of their seminars. I asked him what other portal had a default order by date on searches rather than price. He didn’t know any of course. I told him I thought the only reason that realestate.com.au used the date order as the default sort was so they could sell products like feature products and feature all products. His response was that I might just learn something if I go to one of their seminars. I kept asking for the stats and finally got his commitment to send them to me after finally asking if he would not have quoted me statistics if they didnt exist would he ? So apparently they are on their way. Has anybody seen an REA survey to an agent or a visitor even asking what their preferred default sort method would be? If I get the info I will be sure to post it. Do I hold my breath do you think?

It seems advertising agencies are really in a spin as to where large companies should spend their money. For the most part advertising in Australian Media is really left to the big boys.

But has anyone actually sat back and said, ‘hang on - if so many people are spending so much more time online and are not watching as much TV and listening to as much radio, then why are the figures not telling us this?”

This is because in my opinion the whole way that these things are added up are simply wrong. As an example, I had a little get together last week and I asked a few questions to the 15 guests at a BBQ.

1. How often do you watch TV?
3 people said they never watched TV at all, but sometimes hired a DVD. 4 people rarely watched TV, 3 people told me they watched TV every night and the remaining 5 told me that their TV habits have changed so much and that they watch much less TV than they did only a few years ago.

2. How often do you listen to radio?
6 people never listen to the radio, 4 do only on the way to work (in their car) and 5 listen to a couple of shows in bed at night.

3. How often do you buy the newspapers?
3 never do, 12 always buy the Sunday Papers, 8 buy that Saturday papers as well (and all of these 8 mentioned the property guide) but only 3 purchased the midweek papers.

4. Use the Internet?
14 people use the Internet everyday. 1 uses the Internet every other day and all use the Internet for researching property. In fact 12 told me they look at property at least 4 times a week online.

Now all I can say is that I think companies should really do their own research, I have to say that of all of my friends are pretty much free thinkers and as much as I hate the term (a little left). But it does tell me that all of the research that goes into TV viewers each week is a little pathetic and hardly a true indication of who actually watches TV.

The problems everyone has is that so many companies make money out of TV, Newspapers and Radio advertising and these same companies make very little out of Internet advertising that it makes it hard for large companies habits to change. The last companies I would trust as far as spending my money on marketing would be advertising agencies or ad buyers.

It simply comes down to results and they will vary from city and region, but do not trust just what you are told, do some research yourself. There are a few Google Adword specialist companies out there and one of the bloggers on here does this kind of work.

I would suggest pulling some kind of advertising from another sector, if only for a month or a week and place a little money into marketing your won website through a Google Adwords campaign, you may be pleasantly surprised!

I know these types of articles are not as popular as some others but I believe this is the most important feature that any website will have in 2007. The new products already released or being released this month have rich support for RSS (stands for really simple syndication) Microsoft Office 2007 (all versions), Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 (My Preference).

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RSS in Office 2007 - here
Click on the image for a wider view of RSS in action, information straight from the business2 website into my inbox. I do nmot have to download, as soon as a comment is made it goes directly into my inbox just like a normal email. Think about these as new listings on your website, the user does not have to be on your site to see new listings appear in their email inbox. In short you are not serving your vendors, or your company if your website is not RSS ready in the next 6 months!

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RSS in Internet Explorer 7- here
IE7 has added RSS support right in the web browser. Again, another improvement that have been in other browsers for a long time, but it’s good that now IE has it too. RSS isn’t treated lightly within IE7; in fact, Microsoft built an entire RSS reader and bundled it in with the browser. Now when you click on the RSS button, you’ll see a listing of the feeds provided by a given Web site. Click the feed you want, and IE7 displays the latest headlines and blurbs. Unlike IE6, the page is readable (no more XML gibberish), with links to subscribe and to update the current feed.

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RSS in Firefox- here
Firefox has had RSS as part of its browser for well over a year now and the new version is even sleeker. Firefox 2 gives you full control over Web feeds, showing you a preview and letting you choose how you want to subscribe. You can use a Firefox Live Bookmark, or a feed reader that you’ve installed on your computer.

If you download and install one of these products, try clicking on the orange RSS Icon or clicking here to subscribe to this site, this will give you a good idea of what to do with your own site.

I recently asked an acquaintance of mine who works in marketing for a major franchise if he could supply me with the latest Neilson Netratings Report for Real Estate. Last year I received a few reports and whilst looking through them I came across some information that confused me. So I checked again and now I a even more confused.

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I remember a few years ago talking to an agent about their domain name choice and hearing him say to me that the reason realestate.com.au is the best is because of their domain name. There is no doubt having a great domain name is a good start but the reason for their success has really nothing to do with their domain name. They have a good business model, smart aggressive marketing and a website that works.

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