In a never say die attitude Sensis are changing their online strategy again. Late last year they virtually abandoned their justlisted.com.au site and made it a simple doorway site to Domain’s data but now they want www.tradingpost.com.au to change to an auction system and take on the mighty ebay.

Sensis bought www.tradingpost.com.au in 2004 for a massive $636 million dollars and the business has been sliding back on them since then.

Some pretty big claims have been coming out of Sensis lately, including one that states “2 million people” already use www.tradingpost.com.au each month. Sensis were trying to hold this up against ebay’s 5 million account holders to show that they might gain traction in online auctions.

Now that has to be PR spin plain and simple. After reading this I quickly surveyed the next 20 people I met and not one person had visited www.tradingpost.com.au within the past several months and most have never visited it at all. (more…)

Registering and using multiple domains names was strategy used by many as a great tool for building your business and creating a bigger online presence. Because of the higher costs and strict controls placed on .com.au domain names many agents chose to collect .com domains which are cheap and easy to get.Collecting multiple domains were promoted as a way :

1. Keep your competition from registering a domain name that draws visitors to them instead of you.
2. Increase your exposure in the search engines provide customers more ways to find you when searching the Internet which drives more traffic to your Web sites.
3. Create distinct advertising and promotion strategies that target different markets.
4. Protect your brand and online identity from those who may have unsavoury purpose

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People really don’t want to look for property on a pain-in-the-neck mobile device with poor usability, difficult buttons, a small screen and annoying software.

But all that will soon change. Let me say right now that this post isn’t just more mindless iPhone hype. I don’t think I’ll spring for an iPhone as soon as they become available, but I have no doubt that the iPhone and probably Android, the Google phone software, will finally make real estate search and sales mobile-ready activities.

For the last several years, realestate.com.au has tested partnerships with mobile phone providers. In my opinion, they have never been very successful. I heard that Telstra shut theirs off without even telling realestate.com.au because there was so little traffic that it didn’t make a difference. (more…)

Google has just announced that it will be bringing its ” Street View” images to Australia with images captured over the next several months and become available for viewing later this year.

Google Street View is an added feature of their highly popular Google Maps that provides 360° panoramic views of the street at ground level. It was launched in May this year in the US for a limited number of cities which has been slowly expanded.

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Interview with Google Business Development ‘Real Estate” Justin McCarthy.

“We prefer to look at this data as through organic search, we don’t think it should be paid content, we understand that traditionally classifieds are normally paid content, but we think this data is valuable for consumers” (more…)