I have just realised that tomorrow the 17th of Feb (or that could be today, or even yesterday, depending on when you read this!) is my 10th  anniversary of having a presence on the internet. The day I uploaded my first website www.underdownunder.com.au for my business at the time, a backpacker tour company in Tasmania.

What a Pathetic thing to remember ,I hear you say! Does he have it in his diary? Did he get a Tattoo to mark the occasion? No I didn’t.

What I did was to go to the Internet Archive, Wayback Machine! What a fantastic service. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine allows you to enter a Web address and see what the site looked like over the years. You can select dates of major changes to sites over the years, right back to 1996.

Not only is this site a lot of fun, but it can be a very useful tool in analysing web presence history. Of course, besides my own site, the first name I entered was Google. Here we find the first loaded page for The Internet Giant, some might say God. Nov 11th 1998. And a Link page that is very basic, and says…

Welcome To Google

Google Search Engine Prototype

Might-work-some-of-the-time-prototype-that is much more up to date.

And have a look at the first search page…

Everything they are now is there, then. A solid foundation, that has not been compromised. The Logo is instantly recognisable and the function of the site is the same. Basic Principles adhered to and they are number 1. Yahoo, a similar result. From their first page you can see their direction albeit exactly what they are today, a bit of everything for everybody.

Now, try finding Facebook’s earliest incarnations of what we have today. They have blocked it from showing. Does this indicate a fundamental flaw in their character? (or ours?)

It’s interesting also to see the evolution of our largest Real Estate sites as well, RealEstate.com.au and Domain.com.au.

Anyway I won’t go into anymore musings over the many conclusions that could be drawn over timelines and changes we see, you can do that. Have a play around with it, you’ll have fun.

Or maybe you will think I am pathetic!!!

From the Google press release:

Google Instant is a new search enhancement that shows results as you type. The most obvious change is that you get to the right content much faster than before because you don’t have to finish typing your full search term, or even press “search.” Another shift is that seeing results as you type helps you formulate a better search term by providing instant feedback. You can now adapt your search on the fly until the results match exactly what you want.

When you think about this section of the press release “seeing results as you type helps you formulate a better search term” means a user is provided options before the usual google alogrithm used to rank sites according to SEO is reached.

As an example, if I am a browser and in my mind I was going to search for “real estate bondi”. When I go to Google and type in the words “real estate bondi” you will see that the first real estate agency to appear in the predictive autocomplete is “mcgrath real estate bondi”. Now, the first search term is “real estate bondi” so if I select this, the search results are domain, c21, ljhooker, raywhite, rea, homehound etc. What’s interesting is, that McGrath is not on the first page of search results but actually on the 7th page. So if i’d typed in my initial search term there is very little possibility a user would have found McGrath (on the 7th page). Through this new search method there is a very good chance I may have been enticed to click on the McGrath search term (in the predictive autocomplete)  which would then display McGrath as the first natural google search result.

Here is an explanation Google provided in relation to the algorithm used to calculate the predictive autocomplete:

As you type, Google’s algorithm predicts and displays search queries based on other users’ search activities. These searches are algorithmically determined based on a number of purely objective factors (including popularity of search terms) without human intervention. All of the predicted queries shown have been typed previously by other Google users. The autocomplete dataset is updated frequently to offer fresh and rising search queries. In addition, if you’re signed in to your Google Account and have Web History enabled, you may see search queries from relevant searches that you’ve done in the past.

This is a very significant change in relation to search functionality. As you can see from the example above, 1 week ago Mcgrath had no chance of appearing in a Google search for “Bondi Real Estate”, now they’re almost a certainty. If this new search trend is here to stay then SEO now has a whole other dimension and the SEO strategies of all businesses will need to be revised.

Over the past decade I have investigated various methods of measuring online traffic for the different web sites I’ve managed, and no single measurement seems to bear up to scrutiny. In fact, most do a pretty good job of contradicting each other. Google Analytics? Smarter Stats? Nielsen? Hitwise? Alexa? Take your pick, and think of a number.

This problem was highlighted recently with the publication of Internet Advertising Bureau’s report ⁽¹⁾ showing that online ad spending in Australia has just topped the $2bn mark (doubling over the past 4 years). Another recent report⁽²⁾ predicted internet advertising will nearly double again over the next 4 years to leapfrog newspapers and TV to become the number one advertising medium in Australia.

The $2bn breaks down roughly to half in search/directories (so, mainly Google Adwords), a quarter in online classifieds (mainly real estate, cars and jobs) with the rest spent on general online display ads (skyscraper banners and the like).

The reports bemoaned the fact that although you could measure dollars spent on online advertising, measuring traffic to & from the ads was a guesstimate at best.

With this growing dominance of internet advertising, it would seem important that we can actually measure the precise number of visitors visit our web sites (and to which pages), something the internet was supposed to deliver. All businesses, even the smallest real estate agency office, should know how many people are coming to its online shop window.

Every time a web visitor clicks onto a web site, their visit should be recorded in the log files on the server (unless there’s some serious caching going on). Server-installed software (such as ‘Smarter Stats’) can interpret these and draw some pretty charts in real time, and send you daily/weekly reports by email so you can keep an eye on things.

Alternatively (and maybe additionally as a double check) install Google Analytics code into your web site code, and let Google measure the traffic, as most people do. And/or for those with high traffic sites wanting third party advertising dollars, Nielsen tags are supposed to do the same thing. Or sign up to Hitwise.

For those that can only really afford Google Analytics (it’s free to install), you may have checked the click thrus from, say, your enewsletter to the referrals from the same enewsletter to your web site (as measured by Analytics).

Or those that have paid for advertising on Google Adwords, or other places, may have tried to compare the reported click thrus with the referral traffic measured in the other direction. Shouldn’t every link one way be equal to the referral click measured the other way?

Of course none of these measurements tally up. Nothing like. I find variance by a factor of 2 or 3 times on all the above.

So who’s right? Are they all wrong? I’ve asked many online marketers and ebusiness people and no one seems to have the answer.

End Notes

1. IAB Australia’s Online Advertising Expenditure Report, compiled by PricewaterhouseCoopers,  Aug 2010

2. “Internet Advertising set to Dominate”, Lara Sinclair, The Australian, 2^nd Aug 2010

Photo – Gizmodo (Google StreetView guys)

Google will overcome the teething problems with its real estate proposition and disrupt the business models of property portals across the world.

Every single property portal in the world is wary of the Google Real Estate presence over the past few years and every single portal is scared of the effect Google will have on both their visitor numbers and there revenues.

Over the past year I have read a lot of articles (from portals, their newspapers or individual shareholders) demonstrating how Google’s entry into the market place has not or will not effect either their visitor numbers/revenues. Well they would say that wouldn’t they!

Google’s Effect

It is true so far that Google’s effect has been minimal, however Google has never stated it’s intention to kill off or mame any of the leading portals in the world in a time limited period! In fact, Google is focusing on getting as many listings into their systems as possible, forming new partnerships with various entities to help them get their listings into Google and finally continually refining their systems to make it easier for people to find the property they are looking for, then shoot them off to the originators website of that listing for complete property information.

Once Google has these three elements close to perfect, they can then think about a mass marketing campaign through, yes you guessed it, the most powerful online marketing tool on the planet – the Google Search Engine!

The two big differences Google has that others who have failed before them do not – is time and money!

Google’s mantra is to “Don’t be Evil”. Think about this, who are they going to upset with a successful assault on the property market? In the USA MLS providers? Come one, hardly anyone thinks they serve any purpose other than hanging on to a business model that expired in the early 90′s. Fee based real estate portals? Just about every real estate agent in the world rates their fee based real estate portal only slightly north of Saddam Hussein.

The free listing portals may need to adjust their business models, but specialized search engines like www.estately.com would probably welcome the success of Google!

All in all a Google success would mean current successful businesses will have to adjust their business models, evolve into new offerings, improve their practices and innovate – after all, isn’t that what capitalism is all about?

Everyone is in a rush to judge Google on their immediate impact. Real estate is just another business Google is involved in and they will take their time before marketing the product globally. Just don’t expect any of the incumbents real estate portals (many owned by news organisations) to rush out with a headlines promoting their competition, like ‘Google having an impact, revenue and visitor numbers plunge for xxxx.com’ )

The incumbents will always find a light for their own real estate businesses whilst shedding darkness on their competitors. This is the toughest thing for Google in real estate – getting the free headlines they attract in different markets (search, telephony, Internet). With property they are playing against many of the largest media companies in each country, which means fewer free promotions for their real estate services!

Google is a publicly traded company, it is a profit machine and there is no bigger game globally online for revenue than real estate. To be the number one real estate destination worldwide for property listings would be worth anywhere from $3 – 5 billion in additional revenues for Google, they just don’t realize it yet.

This is not to say Google needs to improve what they are doing and needs to form new partnerships to do this – it does! One area they can improve upon is rewarding individual agents for feeding their listings directly to Google by giving them the referral . At the moment it seems a bit of a lottery as to who gets the referral when a user clicks on a listing to see the full information. It should go to the originator of that listing – the person who signed the vendor. Not some portal or directory. This should not be that difficult!

Google also needs to acquire a few tools in the long run. I do believe Google will acquire a listing system/engine and offer it for free for agents and web developers/portals to hook into. In full disclosure, this is the very business I operate (www.zooproperty.com). However the reason I think they need to do this is because it gives them some control over the cycle of a property from listing to sales/rentals to sales/rental history, it also allows for them to know who the listing originates from.

If Google launched an open system that allowed agents to manage their listings and then distribute them across a variety of platforms they would get 90% of independent agents on board within a year. Every single portal in the world would join up to get feeds from that system and web developers globally would rejoice in finally having a system they can play with. Google will also be able to integrate Google Adwords, Adsense and other tools directly to developers and agents.

Also, never underestimate the power of the open web developer, one only has to think of the success of the Firefox browser to showcase how powerful the common web developer has become. If you build something that helps the web developer, the marketing power of that alone is enough to propel a product into the spotlight.

If Google take their time and work with agents, developers, portals and listing systems they will have an impact, it will come down to how much they control as to their next move, however once they start seeing the revenues flow in you can be sure Google will expand their presence.

If you are a real estate agent, you need to get all of your listings to Google, talk to your web developer, for them to build this into their system (if they already haven’t) should only take a few days.

You need to do this anyway, invest the time and you will be rewarded.

Note: A Version of this article first appeared on Global Edge UK.

Prior to the launch a number of the major real estate franchise groups have demonstrated their support for the REI move by agreeing to upload their NSW property listings onto the RealEstateView.com.au portal.

It’s anticipated that other networks and lots of independent agents will also join in and show their support for a National Industry Based Real Estate Portal and National Sales Data System over the coming weeks.

The press release states:-

Partnering with the Real Estate Institute of New South Wales (REINSW), the launch in NSW marks the 5th state in which propertydata.com.au – the industry-owned data product and realestateVIEW.com.au property portal will be operating – making it one step closer to becoming a truly national portal.

Petra Sprekos, General Manager of propertyDATA.com.au & realestateVIEW.com.au says, “This launch marks a significant milestone in our plans to become a truly national data product and portal for our agents. As NSW is the largest property market in Australia, this expansion will allow us to continue to grow our data product and the portal to become one of the leading offerings in Australia.”

In addition Ms Sprekos said “With major agents such as Century 21, Laing & Simmons, LJ Hooker, Raine & Horne, First National and PRDnationwide already publishing to our portal, we are confident that uptake of realestateVIEW.com.au will be strong as agents are looking for more cost effective tools to run their business.”

propertyDATA.com.au & realestateVIEW.com.au are currently offering a $1800 discount off the yearly subscription fee to the first 100 subscribers through the foundation membership package.

For only $385 per month for metro agents and $275 per month for regional agents, foundation membership provides access to;

1)      PropertyDATA.com.au which provides latest sales and auction results collected via the REI call centre, access to the dynamic prospecting tool – known as GoProspecting and on the market data to get a well rounded view of the market.

2)      RealestateVIEW.com.au which provides a low cost advertising solution, free multi-loading to the large portals, free rental archive to benchmark rental values in the market and free website powering .

For more information on how propertyDATA.com.au & realestateVIEW.com.au can benefit your business – visit www.realestateVIEW.com.au/NSWLaunch. (after tonight’s event) or email sales@realestateview.com.au.

I had a brief discussion with Petra Sprekos yesterday and she was pleased to see the level of support that they’ve been receiving both from within the real estate industry and outside of the industry. Petra was also very happy to see that the visitor numbers to the site had already started climbing quite significantly.

Also, earlier today Kevin Turner of REUNCUT posted an “Exclusive interview with Enzo Raimondo of REIV and David Airey of REIA about the National Real Estate Industry Portal ~ http://ow.ly/1Syrl“.

During the interview REIA President, David Airey commented that “RealEstateView.com.au is a very important part of the national fabric of the real estate institutes. The success for example in Western Australia of REIWA.com.au is evidence that Real Estate Institute members will suppoort their industry owned portal and this expansion on the eastern seaboard by RealEstateView.com.au is just a great initiative”

David also went on to say, “I think industry members will support an industry owned portal rather than the commercial alternative and the results that RealEstateView.com.au can deliver will be just as good as anybody else and probably I’d like to think better in time.”

REIV CEO, Enzo Raimondo said “We’ve been doing a lot of work over the past 18 months on putting together a national platform, not jut as a portal for consumers to search for property but more importantly, the tools that agents need for managing those listings, the collection of data right round the country, so we can give it back to the agents to use for CMA’s, valuations or whatever else they’d like to do with it and also a Prospecting Tool.”

He also went on to say that, “We’ve definitely driven the cost of these services down and that’s our intent right around Australia.” (You can hear the rest of the interview here).

During the interview, Enzo also told Kevin that they are currently in talks with one of the data providers with regards to having them come on board as well. At this point in time Enzo couldn’t say who it is but with REINSW and EAC/Red Square recently parting company, I can only assume that the data operator in question would be PriceFinder (PDS Live).

Whilst it’s only speculation at this stage, I hope my hunch is right because, if so, this could exert some real pressure on RP Data’s current stronghold on data throughout the Australian real estate industry.

At tonight’s launch, I’m looking forward to catching up with Wayne Stewart, President of the REINSW to see if he can shed some light on what the REINSW’s proposed launch strategy is.

One thing is for sure, it’s going to be very interesting to see how it all unfolds.

Whilst the use of QR Codes hasn’t really taken off as yet, they should start to become more and more popular now that Google has jumped on board.

With Google’s Favourite Places, the reviews that appear on Google about a real estate agency will also continue to grow in importance.

Google have said that “We have not yet made a decision about plans for this program beyond the U.S.” but they have already expanded the service into Vancouver, so it looks like it could end up coming to Australia some time soon.

Businesses don’t have to pay anything to become a part of Google’s Favourite Places, but they must have signed up for a free account with the Google Local Business Centre.

Despite making it clear that it will take time, some industry heavies quickly began commenting on how little effect Google was having on sites like realestate.com.au with increased share prices /revenues traffic figures. The most vigorous of these was writing on just about every single notable real estate blog (including his own) how it wasn’t making a jot of difference, I thought at the time, it was pretty short sighted from a person who should know better!

I also made it clear that it will take time for Google’s impact to occur. Only when Google Real Estate has similar volumes of listings and only when they include the searchability of these listings directly within the search engine will it begin to have an impact on the majors.

Now it seems Google is stepping it up a gear……..is this an aggressive phase for Google?

During a session at the 2010 Inman Real Estate Connect conference in New York, Sam Sebastian, Google’s director of local and business-to-business markets, was quoted as saying “We’re actively looking to acquire one to two small real estate companies a month.”

Read this again………
“We’re actively looking to acquire one to two small real estate companies a month.” This statement speaks volumes of just how important Google thinks real estate is to their overall search strategy. It tells me they really do think it is one of the most popular search markets. Many people are talking of Google purchasing the likes of Trulia, Roost and some other independent companies. Personally, I think they will buy into products that compliment and drive traffic to their search and real estate website rather than buy other search engines and portals, they will also more than likely delve into products to compliment their Andriod operating system and new phone offerings.

Life without Realestate.com.au and Domain.com.au?
One thing is for sure, in a few years the real estate landscape will be completely different. Once Google has comparable listings and if it is confident it has a faster way to search then all that needs to happen is for consumers to become aware and use the systems and things will get tough for the portals.

Realestate.com.au and Domain.com.au continue to provide a decent service to agents, however it is the control that agents are wary of – no one likes having monopolies or duopolies, it only serves the few and each and every time hurts too many businesses and stifles innovation. Google’s involvement in any major industry allows a fair price to be charged for services, forces innovation and will make companies like Realestate.com.au and Domain.com.au offer better support and services for their money.

When i first looked at myhousehunt I noticed it was displaying listings from REA and Domain. I thought this was unusual as I doubt they had permission from either portal to do this. I recently visited the site and noticed they explicitly state that:

“MyHouseHunt will search for properties currently listed on Domain.com.au”

So it appears Domain have given the green light while REA in typical style, have unleashed their lawyers on the scraping site.

I’m always puzzled why REA will never share their content. What threat does a site like myhousehunt have on a real estate portal, in particular REA? Nothing, they display a few details of each listing with a link back to the original property on REA. All this will do is strengthen the REA brand and drive traffic back to their portal increasing those UB’s they’re always talking about. Thumbs up to Domain for embracing applications like this as it encourages greater innovation and the creation of cool and useful real estate applications.

Here is the official Google press release from Google.

Around half of the Googlers in our Sydney headquarters are software engineers, working on some really cool things – Google Wave, App Engine, Google Docs, and of course, Google Maps.

Recently, some of us have been working on a particularly interesting project that combines Google Maps and search technology – we’ve been trying to work out if your search query in Google Maps means you’re interested in having current real estate listings returned to you. It’s nice to get to work on some ‘search’ engineering down here!

So here’s what we’ve been cooking up – in the past, if you wanted to view real estate listings on Google Maps, your best bet was to select “Real Estate…” from the “More” menu at the top of the map.

Now, simply searching for “real estate” will return, well, real estate (try it)! You could also try “homes for sale sydney” or “homes for rent adelaide“. Or while you’re at it, check out “apartments for sale brisbane“, or “homes for rent near perth“. The idea is to make it really easy for you guys – you tell us what you want, and we get it back to you! Of course, we’ll continue to work to return the best results for all your Google Maps queries, whether you’re looking for local businesses, geographic features, or your perfect home.

We also wanted to tell you about the integration of real estate listings with Place Pages. Now clicking the “more info” link next to a listing takes you to a faster, easier-to-read page that gives you all of the information we have about a listing: photos, inspection times, videos, details, a Street View preview and nearby public transit information if available, allowing you to quickly find the listing you want and click through to the sources of the listing.

We hope you find these features improve your real estate search experience on Google Maps.

Credit Note: Thanks to Craig from www.baseestate.com for the heads up

I recently wrote about using Google Insights to compare the relative strength of each real estate brand in Australia. I showed how you could compare each brand against each other and how you could also see the strength of each brand across the states.

When I shared this, it was in fact the second way I had found to independently compare the major brands around Australia. As I chose to explore the first option a bit more before writing about it I shared here about the Google Insights method.  It’s now time to share the first method I found which uses Google Maps Real Estate and approaches it on a completely different basis.

Realestate.com.au and Domain will have you believe that Google has only a small percentage of the total number of listings.  From my experience that is not the case and Google has far  more listings than domain and much closer to Realestate.com.au. Back in August I actually spent a bit of time analysing the matter for an article on our agency blog about the subject. In our area at least the numbers were very close.

The one group of real estate agents that  are all featured on Google Maps are the major real estate groups. Now using Google Maps, or even the maps sections of any of the portals you could always view all the properties in an area, but there was no easy way to determine which listings belonged to which agents. Ideally each agency should be in a different colour much like different coloured pins on a large wall map.

In a little know addition to Google Maps you can now plot multiple searches on the one map.  To show you how to do this I have created a video comparing some real estate major brands first in South East Queensland and then scroll  down to the  southern states.

Very soon to be released on the market is a free online tool that will take this concept to a local level and allow you to plot individual offices against each other. You will be able to view the property your agency has in one colour and listings for sale each of your competitors have in other colours.

*****UPDATE*****

I was just sent this update on the mapping service I referred to above. This will go down to the local agent level and allow  you to identify hot spots and opportunities and will provide excellent market intelligence for the agents that use it right.  I believe the service will be free with possibly some advertising on the side and your settings can be saved so you can look at it live any time you want.  More details when it launches and I think that is goign to be early next week.

In case your interested we (Nerang First National) are the green, LJ Hooker Nerang is the Red and Ray White Nerang is the blue. There are about another 7 other agents in the area but ourselves and Hookers are the dominant market players.

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