Yesterday, I read this message from Chris Smith about Facebook’s plans to roll out one-to-one email capability for Facebook Fan Pages.

“Just Announced via Mari Smith: Facebook will begin to allow one to one messages to be sent from a Facebook Business Page to anyone who Likes the page. So for example, if you have 1,000 fans you could technically now email them via Facebook. This is monumental in my opinion as most people did not Like Pages knowing they would get messages from them, even one to one messages. Will this cause a mass unliking of Pages that suck? You betcha! Could even cause anyone on the fence to completely leave Facebook all together. I know their are Pages I liked years ago that if I now started getting emails from them I would be very upset. How do you all feel about this it literally just broke?”

So what this means is that you will soon be able to connect with your Fans via email, which is great news for Facebook Page Admins who are also good at marketing because it provides another way to connect with your fans.

But, WARNING: it’s also a Kamakazi (Crash & Burn) Marketing Tool for admins who think it’s a great idea to start spamming fans with poorly thought out email notifications.

Personally, I really like the idea that it will enable my FB fans to email me if they want to ask me a question privately rather than posting a comment publicly on my wall.

Plus, maybe (just maybe) send a Thank You message to each new fan for joining in individually (BUT even the message within that email would need to be very carefully constructed because it’s normally so early within the relationship).

This new functionality could also provide an opportunity for FB Fan Page admins to individually notify competition winners and/or notify existing fans that they are in the running to win any new competitions (as a Value-Add) that the Page administrator may be conducting from time to time in an effort to entice more NEW fans to join their page.

Beyond that, at this stage I can’t see any other instance where I’d use this functionality personally…BUT I know for sure that some Facebook Fan Page Admins are going to misuse this new function and stuff up big time.

I think this is great for individuals or businesses using Facebook Fan Pages but be warned…if placed into the wrong hands or misused, it could dissolve your Facebook fan base very quickly.

Interested to hear what the B2 community thinks about this latest update on Facebook?

This week RealestateCommercial.com.au a small player in the Australian commercial real estate space announced that it had secured funding from Chinese based Zhuhai Huachen. The Company shortly will be undertaking a capital raising program on the Australian Small Scale Offerings Board where they plan to raise a total of $1.2 million with investors owning around 30% of the Company valuing the company at $4m. 

Li Dan Financial Manager of Zhuhai Huachen Constructions stated “We are very happy to commence an association with Real Estate Commercial in Australia and here in China through their website www.zhongguorec.com, this is our first overseas venture and we see the business development between Australia and China growing in the future. We were impressed by the development to date of the website here in China and see the synergy between the real estate markets in China and Australia in the next few years as a fast growing market, particularly with more and more Chinese looking to invest in property overseas, with Australia high on that list. We will be looking to invest further in the Australian Company during their capital raising program through ASSOB (Australian Small Scale Offerings)”

Russell Robertson, Managing Director and Founder of Real Estate Commercial in Brisbane said “We welcome the investment from the Chinese company and their local knowledge will be vital to our future plans for China. We have more products in the pipeline for both countries and look forward to advancing our beta website running in China (www.zhongguorec.com) and working closely with our new partners.”

An ex Gold Coast real estate agent and current property developer, Rod Lambert has been broadcasting an interesting email to agents throughout the country today. If you have not got it in your inbox yet, chances are it will arrive soon.

I have a real problem with what Rod has done but first read the email yourself :-

*********************************************

Dear agents, the website hereunder will become one of the greatest listing devices you have ever come across against Ray White.

I am a property developer who was defrauded by Michael Kollosche of Ray White Broadbeach and have complained bitterly to Ray White and provided evidence that he conspired with a three time convicted fraudster and criminal to force us into buying a property that was artificially inflated by $2.74 Million dollars.

I now intend to expose this mercenary company for their ruthless and underhanded tactics which Brian White supports and advocates.

As we all know, we have heard the numerous complaints over the years about Ray White agents and their unscrupulous and underhanded conduct, particularly at auctions.

 The Chairman Brian White does nothing to stop it.

 The case in point is that of the Ray White superstar Michael Kollosche from Ray White Broadbeach who is under major investigation by the OFT and the QPS after multiple complaints were made about his conduct in relation to artificial price hiking on the Gold Coast’s Mermaid Beach beachfront.

There have been complaints including allegations of fraud and misleading and deceptive conduct by several parties.

Ray White still employ him, and  Brian White backs him.

Kollosche was recently named and shamed in the Queensland Parliament by the Member for Rockhampton, The Honorable Robert Schwarten MP.

 He has admitted to The Australian Newspaper of knowing about fraud on the Mermaid beachfront yet Brian White does not make him go to the Police. Why?

The truth is White thinks he is above the law and this web site that has been designed in the public interest and will shed light onto what this company is really about and what some of them get up to.

Have a look in the Austlii search section in the site and type in Ray White and see how much litigation Ray White is involved in.

It is frightening…..your sellers, buyers  and landlords should be made aware of it!

Please get this web site out to as many people around Australia as you can.

Be sure the CEO’s of major Agency groups see this site.

One thing is for sure, if you are up against Ray White for a listing in the future, be sure the seller views this site, once they do the listing will be yours!

www.donttrustraywhite.com

Regards,
Rodwell Lambert

Property Developer

Mobile 0408 780 065
Email rlambert@onthenet.com.au
PO Box 350, Nobby Beach Q 4218

 ********************************************

My problem with Rod’s actions is about how he is attacking the whole Ray White membership with what some individuals have alledgedly done.   I know if  a salesperson in a First National office on the other side of the country  wronged a client I would be disgusted but equally so I would also be disgusted and out for blood if  local agents tried to use it against me in a listing presentation here on the Gold Coast.

You have to give  credit to Rod for one thing, he is standing openly by his claims and not hiding behind anonymous websites.  I have no knowledge if Rod’s claims are true but if they are I hope that the Queensland Police and OFT bring the hammer down.

The issues themselves that are raised on the website have already been featured heavily in the public domain in newspapers and even on Today Tonight.

I think Rod’s choice to concentrate on the whole Ray White network in the domain name itself and by asking agents to show sellers the site is a bad one and will effect on good people throughout the network that have done nothing to him. In my opinion he should have kept the fight to just the Broadbeach office.

Obviously Rod has had problems with Brian White as well which is why he might be justifying the attack on the whole network.  I would like to hope that Brian is waiting until the QPS and OFT investigations are finalised before doing anything drastic but again it does not matter,  the rest of the network are not at fault.  If they individuals are found guilty they will and they should be punished to the full extent of the law.

I believe that agents should refrain from using the site to attack their local Ray White real estate offices. Besides the legal implications of doing so I just dont think its right or fair.

There are many advantages of belonging to a real estate group but one of the disadvantages is in times like these when actions of other members reflects badly and unfairly on you.  If this is used like Rod is asking Brian White and the whole Ray White group are going to find themselves  in need of a fantastic Reputation Management consultant.

Is it fair to attack the whole team if one of the players has done the wrong thing?

What do you think??   Is Rod right or wrong on this one?

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

This response from Brian White was received in the comments section of the article :

A comment from Brian White, Chairman, Ray White Group:

You may have received an email pertaining to a commercial dispute between a former practising real estate agent and developer and one of our agents on the Gold Coast.

This dispute has been particularly painful for me and my family. Our business has been in operation for 110 years. It has been built on the hard work and strong ethics of so many people for so long.

When complaints are made we, as trustees of the Group, investigate them diligently. Where there is proper evidence of wrongdoing we do take immediate action. We do however stand by the presumption of innocence and, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we support our people wherever possible.

This particular issue is complex and has been running for a number of years without any clear findings from any of the external authorities to date. During this time we have also investigated this matter extensively with the full support of the Ray White parties involved. We have also cooperated fully with the Office of Fair Trading in it’s independent investigation.

The Office of Fair Trading has indicated it cannot provide a time frame for its decision. However they understand the urgency of the matter. We hope it will be concluded soon and, of course, we will comply fully with any findings the Department makes.

In the meantime, we appreciate the overwhelming support from members of our network as well as those industry professionals who operate externally from our Group.

You would be forgiven for thinking real estate is all online these days  it dominates the landscape that much and online the search engines are the first port of call for property related traffic.  Just after leaving Simon Baker confirmed that even realestate.com.au received massive traffic, somewhere over 30% from Google which is just one search engine.

Portals and particularly the top two paid portals absolutely saturate the search engine results by investing heavilly in SEO teams. They take the listings data of real estate agents and combine it with questionable tactics to create millions and millions of pages across multiple domains. This tactic effectively blocks real estate agent websites from search engine results thus starving us from direct enquiry.

These tactics by the portals is highly questionable and is evidence of the power they have developed in our industry. We are charged to display our listings on the portals and in return we are restricted to what we can display. We are not allowed to link back to our own website on each listing. We cant put contact details or phone numbers in the body text of the ad. Breach the rules and they will remove the property, do it too many times and they threaten to kick you off.  Any links they do give you and the portals insert ‘no-follow tags’ on the links back to the agent websites which tells the search engines to ignore our websites and that they have no value.

They justify that enquiry by charging higher and higher monthly fees but the problem in this relationships are more than the monthly subscription charges. also a death of thousand cuts it goes further than that with the portals undertaking lead generation schemes whereby they intercept sellers on the site and sell those leads back to agents at inflated rates. The traffic that agents have helped create is being used to promote private listings on Domain and now even realestate.com.au.

I believe that Realestate.com.au would generate more traffic than all the large national real estate groups combined. Agents have effectively given control of their listing enquiries to the portals and now seller leads to two large media companies who have taken every opportunity and they will not give up that control easily.

Real estate groups are also suffering as agents around the country have rather cut their ties with head office rather than their realestate.com.au and/or domain.com.au subscriptions. Joining a large real estate franchise or marketing group once respresented a great differentiator from other agencies in your area. If you listen to the portal sales team the only way to differentiate your agency now is to pay more and more for feature properties, feature all, brochure all and all the other add on products. Real Estate groups are seen to be providing an ever diminishing value to their franchisees and members.

As real estate agents we have given them our listing data and our money willingly for years but the level of antipathy from agents seems to rise year on year at pace equal to the price rise.

With the 2012 realestate.com.au price rise just about to be released rumours are rife that its going to be the biggest one yet. So more and more real estate agents are going to be asking themselves the magical question more than ever – Can I survive without a realestate.com.au subscription?

Cutting the umbilical cord to the subscription based portals is always going to be difficult especially since we have essentially been starved of enquiry on our own websites by the SEO teams at the portals. Cutting that link would be extremely difficult and disasterous without an extremely effective e-marketing strategy in place covering SEO, PPC, Social Media and Email Marketing.

Australian real estate agents are not alone in asking if they can survive without syndicating their content to a national portal. In the USA agents have been cutting that cord from syndicating to their national portals. Edina Realty and Shorewest Realty in Wisconsin were among the first but the one group that has recently got the USA market buzzing is ARG. Abbott Realty Group (ARG) recently announced that they will no longer syndicate listings to third-party aggregators like Trulia, Zillow and Realtor.com.

Watch this video from ARG as they justify their decision to cut the umbilical cord. I think they do a great job in explaining their decision.

Agents, after watching the video ask yourself – Can I survive without a realestate.com.au/Domain subscription? and if the answer is no, what do you have to do to be able to answer yes?

Actually the real question you should be asking yourself is can you afford not to be working towards this goal?

Rent.com.au is consolidating its position as Australia’s #1 rental property website, indicating in a December press release they have achieved 300% growth in the number of agency listings on their website since February 2011. They also indicate their portal has over 40,000 residential and holiday rentals now being listed by agencies across the country.

In the press release Mark Woschnak (CEO Rent.com.au) goes on to say some of their growth can be attributed to principals paying more attention to their rent rolls in these trying times, but other key factors include:

1. The unique traffic audience rent.com.au gets whereby over 40% have not been to REA and over 50% have not been to Domain. This provides an effective and genuine additional and growing target market to what most agencies get via REA alone.
2. The rent.com.au listing package offers excellent value for all agents, providing genuine rental enquiry and strong branding.
3. The specific range of services on rent.com.au that is purposely designed for property managers, including the unique property management lead generation services.
4. The high organic and natural online benefits of the domain name and branding that exists amongst the younger 18-39 year old renter community. Most importantly the brand that rent.com.au has developed as a rental solution stands proudly and clearly apart from all home purchaser focused sites.
5. The extensive national coverage of listings which continues to grow.

In mid December, Rent.com.au underwent a long overdue makeover. The site has a very fresh and almost fun feel, appearing as though they borrowed ideas from US based portals and social networking sites. Mark Woschnak on the recent upgrade:

Our recent site upgrade in early December, provides a much smarter and faster search engine, more flexible and detailed search options, improved tools for renters to keep track of their properties of interest, enhanced social media communication options and the largest photo display of any major portal, all of which provide an excellent user experience.

Rent.com.au has been around for a long time and its great to see them start receiving some reward for their hard work and persistence. We look forward to their continued success!

Ever since the age of the cassette tape the media industries across the globe have been “lobbying” and “contributing” to our politics in a way many of us do not even understand. We pretty much live in a world now where where just about all levels of government are enabled not by the people, but by corporations and PIPA and SOPA are just another two examples of how industries will stop at nothing to have control over what we can consume, when we can consume it and in what manner it is consumed!

Citizen politics these days are divided by extremes, almost entirely divided by motives and ideologies and not by critical self thinking of the the real issues that we face. One of the main drivers for my thinking on politics is to do this, I do not listen to politicians for advice or positions, nor do I listen solely to so called experts. I actually do a little thinking for myself, I completely distrust my motives for automatically taking one side, which is so easy to do. Things that matter to me, I research on my own.

We are lucky in this case that we have people that do this for us, a couple of bills that were just rejected by Congress in the US, will be back again very soon, for 20 years the media industries have been trying to these jam bills through levels of governments that will have a global effect and they will try again next year. I have attached a video from a TED talk on this issue, watch it and learn a little about it’s history and the effect these types of laws can have on our everyday life.

One of the more pathetic things about politics these days (believe me, there is a list) are bills that are introduced with brand names that have no recognition to the poisoned pills that are contained within. One such set is trying to get through Congress in the USA is SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act). On the surface with these brand names seem to be doing the right thing, but anyone who has read such bills (I actually took the time to read the presented version) know that these are poisonous to our online culture.

So who is behind this act? Well again, it’s the usual suspects, the same industry groups that wanted to place a levy every blank CD and DVD in the past decade, the same groups that wanted to make all copying of cassette tapes illegal in the 80′s and 90′s and the same ones that wanted to place limits on photo copying machines in the 70′s. By their reasoning everyone should pay for the acts of the few, citizens should be guilty until proven they are innocent.

As demonstrated in the past week, when people actually pirate and distribute copyright materials we already have laws that deal with these things and eventually many do get caught. There is a process of law that takes place for doing something illegal, that is evidence is gathered, charges are laid and then a trial takes place. This bill wants to reverse this process!

If you look at the Internet today, citizens across the globe are the ones that actually create the content. Large media companies account for far less than 1% of actual content on the Internet, it is we who create the majority of content, we mix the content, we share the content and in some cases media companies want this content we create. Media companies are shrinking by content produced, they employ less reporters, they employ more marketing and sales executives and they all encourage us to send them the ‘their’ news. The Arab Spring wasn’t brought to the globes attention by media companies, it was primarily produced and shared by citizens and the media companies lapped this content up and reproduced it as their own.

Fortunately we had some big guns in our corner, but for the most part only because they had a dog in the fight. Google, Wikipedia, Reddit and other online tech giants all made a big play to stop the bill, mainly because it will require them to pass on personal information to these private companies without recourse and will also require them to add DNS filtering to every user at a significant cost to them.

These media groups should have to go through the same law enforcement challenges citizens face when our home is burgled and our belongings stolen, they should not have laws passed that give them the gavel. My suggestion for them is to shut the hell up and accept it is a part of life and work out ways to profit from this! Of couse they will not do this, they will just massage the current bill, until they can get one that passes, and hopefully we will be ready to reject the next version as we were for this!

“Every act of creation is the first act of destruction “ – Pablo Picasso

As the balance of control and profits in the short-term holiday rental market continues to change for the players in this market: the owners, property managers, internet marketing channels and the clients, the response we make as property managers to the changing approaches will determine our longevity in this industry. The question is who really benefits in the end or are we just in a race to the bottom?

The internet has reshaped the holiday property management industry as it has done to nearly every other industry in Australia not sparing real estate sales. It has created a change of paradigm, with profits being distributed to more players wanting a piece of the holiday rental pie. The wealth potential and the vast number of people holidaying in self-contained holiday homes have attracted some big players. The Fairfax Group recently acquired Rentahome and Takeabreak (this follows their purchase of Stayz in 2005), and the US holiday rental group, Homeaway, bought www.realholidays.com.au in April last year.

Up until about the year 2000, holiday property managers called the shots. They were traditional businesses that managed owners’ properties – they took on all the responsibilities of renting the properties and they had control over the conditions under which renters stayed including cleaning, repairs, payments and profits. They provided the complete service.

Then along came the internet.

At an embryonic stage in the early years of this century, Ozstays joined other new distribution channels in the industry seizing an opportunity. It developed a new web process to empower property owners. The rental property paradigm began to change – a new process began to evolve.

Ozstays empowered property owners to change the way their holiday house was managed. No longer were owners bound by the usual ways of managing holiday rental property. Some, disenchanted with the traditional property manager, leapt at this new opportunity and went their own way. Ozstayz gave owners a way to self manage and put the commissions back into their own pockets and return a greater profit for their holiday investment property and many discounted the rate that the existing manager was charging to compete. They found locals to clean their property for incoming guests. A new rental management process was born, and it appealed to the holiday maker because it was cheaper – sometimes much cheaper than market price – and it allowed renters to deal directly with the owners.

There were some downsides: service level to the holiday-going client in many instances was decreased and, often there was no local office or assistance. But some properties ended up being marketed by owners at half the price advertised by the property management company. The holiday maker was the winner in this situation. As time went on and owners grew in confidence, some told their property managers to decrease charges or they would take back rental control of their own properties. To compete and keep their owners, many property managers dropped their pricing to keep their clients and some margin of profit. Again, control and profits were shifting.

As Ozstays attracted more and more owners, it became stronger and more owners used it. The process created an upward spiral of control over the market, not just over individual properties. Ozstays expanded and became Stayz. It wasn’t alone in this web-based approach: other similar marketing opportunities became available – Last Minute, WOTIF, Rent-a-Home, Takeabreak and local directories. The more owners that worked through an internet marketing site, the larger the site became, the greater the ranking in Google and so on… These new paradigms began outranking the traditional approaches, so then the traditional joined in and began listing on these new directories as well, thus contributing to the power and control of their competitors!

Top of the food chain
In the mid to late 90s, marketing was easy. $25 a quarter bought an advertisement in NRMA’s Open Road magazine. With the advent of internet, a website and, with some email marketing tools and a growing appreciation of SEO websites were generally what was required to be atop of the internet listings. Then along came Google and Google Adwords, and this allowed new players to spend their way to the head of the listings and then at the same time was the emergence of the Stayz, Last Minute. Wotif Take a Break and so on.

Ahead in the Game
The internet has brought about very significant change for the holiday rental property management industry right across Australia. In its initial years, it was seen as the savior, but in recent years and particularly in today’s current economic circumstances, the internet-based approaches have unsettled the status quo. It is not unusual to find holiday property management business that 10 years ago were charging in excess of 20% management fees now charging below 15% in response to the lower prices forced by the channels have pushed rental prices down. Property Management companies now have no choice other than to cut traditional costs and or find new streams of revenue; the old model is being buried and those not changing possibly may die with it.

Where’s all this leading? Does internet-based channel marketing and management spell the end for property managers? For some, the answer could be yes. For property managers who ignore the trends and current tools, the internet will have an impact on them similar to the impact a very large comet had on dinosaurs. And there are some property managers like this out there!

Given that new tools exist, it is amazing to hear and speak to businesses today that still operate using a calendar book and Fluorescent felt tip pens. I was dumbfounded in August 2010 when I went to a REINSW conference in Sydney where one of the keynote speakers spent about 10 minutes explaining how he colour-codes his keys! Yes, coloured envelopes with coloured key tags placed in an overnight safe for incoming guests. Just the management of keys for 50 properties would, over the course of a year, cost a holiday property management business a considerable amount. It’s now 2012 and better processes are available.

A Vision: The Future of Holiday Rental Property Management
The next dominant species of holiday property managers is evolving. They have a new philosophy on the whole business and pick up the majority of bookings through their own website but importantly with minimum human intervention; they will have a website that is strong organically and found easily through search engines.

They will use the latest Property Management System (PMS) software as is used throughout more forward markets such as in the USA. In these markets, gone are the days of booking button/Yesbookit type software’s and using channels as the mainstay of generating bookings. The software will have integrated trust accounting and marketing tools all in the complete package. The single PMS package will run the business removing the huge labour cost from the business operation.

For customers, it will be easy to book and pay on the website. In the future, there are no keys; all doors have digital locks, date and time-stamped door codes that are sent by SMS to client phones at check in time. The trust accounting component of the system will be so automated and integrated with the bookings and management system that the time spent each month managing the process will be hours, not days or weeks.

Maintenance personnel will be notified by SMS and email directly from the PMS. The maintenance person will close off jobs directly into the PMS with invoicing and outcomes. In the property management industry of tomorrow, the cost of staff may be an expensive luxury, so communications with and management of owners will also be managed by the PMS.

What is the future role of Stayz, Occupancy, WOTIF, Take a Break, Rentahome, Real holidays and all the other websites? It’s really up to how property management companies respond, we control their destiny. The more they rely on them, the stronger they become. They are the real competition as they continue to take a place in the organic listings in place of the established.

I am in regular contact with property management business around Australia, and the bottom line is that profits are being whittled away with so many factors and opposing paradigms effecting the business. Property managers are potential losers in this changing situation and it is time now to change, evolve and avoid extinction.

Guest Author: Glenn Smith is the CEO of GENKAN and of Thredbonet Marketing Pty Ltd.
GENKAN is leading the way towards visionary property management and responsible for the driving of the companies three-property management business’s, Accommodation Thredbo is the largest holiday rental property manager in the snowy mountains, Port Douglas Reservations and Discover Niseko Japan.

As a follow up to Dave Platters excellent, well articulated post on why anyone “is dreaming” that they can beat real estate.com.au, it made me revisit an idea I had a few years back. I think for the most part Dave is correct, however there is something that needs to be done about property content origination.

To me it has always been about control, if you go back to the early days on business2.com.au I wrote passionately about how agents will pay a price for putting all of their eggs in one basket and relying on one company for their web, marketing and portal needs, and it has pretty much played out in that manner. REA are top dog in many regions of Australia and can rightfully state their number one position. Agencies online property marketing budgets today are pretty much controlled by realestate.com.au and domain.com.au, annual fee increases continue at a clip and the limitations of each agents plans are pretty silly to say the least!

Realestate.com.au is all powerful because they have the listings and consumers will of course go to where the listings are. Consumers also know how to play with realestate.com.au and for the most part it is their favourite tool for browsing for real estate, domain certainly have the numbers on mobile devices but the browser is still king and this will not change in the short to mid term.

REA can pretty much do what they like with pricing, they are the market leader in an industry that is one of the most popular search pastimes in Australia, if you are an agent and you do not list on REA you will pretty much lose listings to other agents that are and REA had a brilliant strategy for agents early on, almost blackmailing agents into going for bigger packages. I lay much of the blame for this with real estate institutes who accepted ‘donations’ from REA in the early days to endorse their portal and put them in front of an eager audience – you!

The REA XML has also become somewhat of a de-facto standard for listings and pretty much all portals accept an REA XML feed to list with them.

If agents and competing portals want to to take that control away and place it back to agents they must do all of these things listed below pretty much in their entirety. Will they do this? Almost definitely not, but it is worth revisiting.

Open Source Listings System

Domain.com.au and all other portals, franchise groups, private agencies and private listing portals (yes they MUST be included) should band together and finance an open source system for managing property data. This must be fully inclusive, and that means REA can also use this system.

It must be built on open source infrastructure, be W3C compliant and define every single element useful to todays real estate agent. The system must have no stakeholders and be open to anyone. The system must be simple to sign up, simple to use and built on an open framework that can have multiple contributors. This would be controlled by a board of developers that have a wall of separation between them and any interested parties.

Agency
Agencies simply register with the system and are given a few tabs to work with (My Agency, My Portals, My Developers, My Apps). They manage all of their staff and can import their current listings into the system and the system takes care of the rest. They select what portals they want to be involved with, can give access to their web developers and can login and manage this information from their desktop, tablet or phone device.

Portals
Portals simply join the system and offer their portals with their standard terms and conditions clearly set out in the system. This will allow any agency to simply check a tick box to allow their data to be shared by that portal. If the portal is free then it simply starts the data transfer and updates instantaneously once changes are made to the data. If it is paid for then a simple code would need to be added to the system.

Developers
Web Developers are given tools to develop websites using this data and be given everything needed to do this effectively, including plugins, sample codes. Agencies can assign web developers to manage their web development by simply ticking a box next to that developer and that developer will have interface access to all they need to develop websites and applications for that agency.

Apps
Any product or service can offer their applications to agencies, be it, mobile phone apps, tablet apps, CRM software services etc. These apps can be free, paid or subscription based. Think of it like the Apple App store.

Cost + Revenue

Yes, to build this and maintain this service would be expensive, but nowhere near what agencies currently pay for the same services. The Real Open Source Community (ROSC) would be funded by annual verification. Initially it would need to be funded by portals and franchise groups with no strings attached (tall order) for two years from launch, but once launched each agency, portal, web developer, app would be encouraged to become verified, this verification would be a community trust system.

The annual report and all expenditure would be open and annual verification fees determined by the previous years revenues. This would ensure that the system was always in the black. The system would also have a constitution drawn up that can only be amended if 75% of all verified users voted up for that amendment – in other words each verified member has an equal vote.

ROSC Constitution

Part of the constitution would be that the data is owned by the listing agent and the text, photos, videos etc would be the copyright of the original author. Any breaches to this constitution would have impacts for any of the members. The terms and conditions that each portal, web developer and app developer disclose would be standardized, so agencies know the pricing, annual increases, sold data information etc from the beginning and as it is standardized there is nowhere to hide little clauses

Private Listing Portals

These would be treated just like anyone else. Yes, I hear you say this is a bad thing, complete nonsense! Over the next decade more and more people will list privately, it will take decades for this to become a powerful movement, and by this time agencies would have adapted their business models to suit It is important because they are an important part of the potential market for all agencies.

Original Sin

The reason for this system would not be too knock off any of the leaders, it would simply be to open the originator of the content and give control back to the agency, the people who create the content. REA and Domain would have access to the system just like anyone else and it is highly likely they would still be the dominant players in the market for the foreseeable future.

So, do you think that portals would get involved, do you think franchise groups would get behind this, even though not one of them will own one snippet of the system?

I’m talking to you.

Yes, you.

The person who thinks you will start an Australian real estate portal that will shoot right past domain, dethrone realestate.com.au and become the new number one.

Or, maybe you’re an agent who for some reason (perhaps because you have to send them a check every month?) doesn’t like realestate.com.au and wishes the industry would start a portal as a realestate.com.au killer.

I have a message for you: you’re dreaming.

I tell you this because of a very interesting discussion that developed in the comments of Ryan’s excellent post on FarmBuy.com.au. I thought I’d pull out the topic and expand on it.

Face it. realestate.com.au is the dominant market leader in online real estate listings in Australia. It would be very hard to beat them at their own game. What’s more, you cannot expect to copy realestate.com.au and win without their help, in the form of massive, ongoing self-destructive behaviour. They are not likely to give you that help.

All those hopeful entrepreneurs trying to create a new website to knock realestate.com.au out of its top spot and take it for themselves are on a fool’s quest. That goes for everyone from domain.com.au and on down. Domain can aspire to a profitable second place. Smaller, later comers can aspire to make a living, maybe, but certainly not to kill the giant.

The plain truth is realestate.com.au is the leader and will be the leader in online real estate listings in Australia as long as there are online real estate listings in Australia. There have been instances in business history when a player with a dominance similar to realestate.com.au’s was displaced by a competitor, but not many.

I say this as someone who has worked at realestate.com.au and with other real estate related web businesses on three continents, and as an entrepreneur.But, if you think I am missing something here, please enlighten me in the comments.

How to Make Money

Tell them they're dreaming!

Instead of leadership, go for a niche and establish a strong brand as the first and best in that niche. Here are some niches that are already in play, with varying degrees of success:

• Farms: FarmBuy
• Rentals: Rent.com.au
• Regional: AllHomes
• Premium property: Million Plus
• Free listings: The Home Page
• Chinese buyers: Juwai.com (a client of mine)

If you can be content with a niche, you could possibly be profitable, or at least one day sell out at a profit. It will be hard, because the Australian market is so small, but it seems possible. A niche could also be an add-on to another real estate-related business, giving that other business strategic advantages — like domain.com.au does for Fairfax’s newspapers.

Still Dreaming?

If a niche is not enough for you, and you want to beat realestate.com.au, there is only one credible strategy. You must dominate a new niche. This new niche by definition cannot be dominated by realestate.com.au and must be able to grow big enough to one day eclipse realestate.com.au. The flaw in this strategy is that you have to be riding a wave of history for it to work for you. Those waves don’t come along often.

For an example, look at realestate.com.au’s own history. The major media businesses had print real estate classifieds locked up prior to the realestate.com.au’s rise. They were unassailable. Classifieds were so reliable and profitable that analysts called them “rivers of gold”.

Then, three friends in Melbourne registered the domain name realestate.com.au and began persuading skeptical real estate agents to put their listings online. They chose a real estate classifieds niche the big players had overlooked: online. And they made themselves the leader in that niche.

(It is true that News International has a stake in realestate.com.au today, but that only goes back to 1992, when Simon Baker in his wisdom convinced News to buy it. realestate.com.au was a pure, independent startup in the classic mold. I reckon if you did the numbers, you would find realestate.com.au has been a much more profitable investment for News Corp than myspace.)

Over time, little realestate.com.au grew and grew by riding the growth of the internet. realestate.com.au won online and rode the internet’s historic growth into the very backbone of our economy and culture. The big media companies still dominate print classifieds, but print is sliding into irrelevance.

As of today, realestate.com.au has reported record revenue for six consecutive half-years, while the newspapers are struggling.

The lesson to draw from this history is simple. real estate portals should not take on the established leader head-on. Find a new niche and become the leader in that niche. You can make a living, and you may even get lucky enough to ride a historic trend into great riches.

The essential elements of  Domain’s email to PropertyNow, is that Domain intend a price increase (after approximately 6 years at the current rate) of something in the order of 53,000% ( based on the current clients using PropertyNow)  If the calculation of the percentage increase were based solely on new clients to PropertyNow from February onward, then the increase is still in the order of 3,000%.

PropertyNow has naturally put its point of view to Domain and to the credit of it’s management, negotiations may take place. I will comment further, but for now here is the letter sent to my business (PropertyNow) on December 15th 2012.

Start of email communication:-

Changes to you Domain advertising rates

We are writing to let you know about some changes to your Advertising Sales Agreement with Domain.com.au.

Ordinarily, we require all private advertisers on Domain.com.au to take out advertisements on a single buy basis. However, we recognise that you are a high-volume private advertiser and we have therefore created a special product to allow you to use Domain.com.au on a subscription basis.

Effective from 1 February 2012, your account will be migrated on to a Domain Flexi Subscription, which means that your rates will change to the applicable monthly State-based subscription rate set out in the table below plus a flat rate of $220.00 incl. GST per Sale listing and $165 incl. GST per Rental Listing.

Each listing will be in Priority Placement format for the first 2 weeks on Domain.com.au.

End text content of Domain email:

PropertyNow’s Viewpoint

From the point of view of PropertyNow, such an increase is the equivalent of filling ones petrol tank today for $60 and then going to the petrol station tomorrow and being charged $1800. The net result will be that PropertyNow will be forced to no longer offer Domain to its clients. This obviously impacts upon hundreds of individual property sellers (eventually many thousands) very directly.

PropertyNow intends to discuss this with the General Manager of Domain, while reserving the right to once again appeal to the ACCC to investigate a potentially anti-competitive practice. Propertynow will also explain to Domain management that it is at error in defining the nature of the PropertyNow business.

It is interesting to myself and no doubt would be to the ACCC, that PropertyNow will be charged massively more than other agents, despite charging its own clients a smaller fee than those agents. I would have thought this to be the absolute definition of an anti competitive practice.

I am interested to hear the thoughts of  Business2 readers in relation to Domains intentions, which were initally mooted back in January 2011.

Andrew Blachut

Director and Licensee PropertyNow

www.propertynow.com.au