Yet, Peter Mericka of Lawyers Real Estate has either found a loop hole in the Victorian agency licensing legislation or Lawyers Real Estate has simply been placed into the too hard basket and has been allowed to continue to practice under the business name Lawyers Real Estate for the past 4 – 5 years without having undertaken any formal real estate licensing… That’s right! 4 – 5 years without a real estate license.

Either way, judging by Peter Mericka’s statement within his video on Today Tonight below and a letter from Robert Guthrie of the NSW Fair Trading Property Services Licensing posted on the Australian Real Estate Blog it would appear that Lawyers Real Estate may be looking to expand their real estate operation into other areas and possibly interstate.

Now I don’t know if it’s simply because of the name of his business that the industry bodies are too scared to take Peter Mericka on or whether there is in fact a loophole within the current Victorian legislation which entitles him to legally continue to operate in this manner as Lawyers Real Estate?

But if there is a loophole, is this business model what agents can expect to see more of into the future?

As a licensed agent I have invested a lot of time and money to achieve my licence and remain licensed.

I continue to pay annual renewal fees and have to undertake ongoing training to obtain the required CPD points required to continue to hold a real estate licence year after year. After watching the Today Tonight story about Lawyers Real Estate, I’m starting to wonder what on earth I’m paying the fees for.

I have to say that I agree with one thing that Peter says in the Today Tonight interview, “the people who matter are the real estate consumers”.

Which leads me to wondering if something did go sour with a transaction via Lawyers Real Estate would the consumer be protected by the Victorian Property Fund? Or is there a different fund that they can make a compensation claim through?

Listings appearing on realestate.com.au

And then there’s the issue about whether Lawyers Real Estate should be allowed to upload their listings onto realestate.com.au as they currently do.

Under the latest version of the General Terms and Conditions for Residential Subscriptions to www.realestate.com.au it clearly spells out who can upload onto their site…

2.1 You represent and warrant in respect of each property you list on our web site that:

(a) you are the holder of a current real estate agent’s licence in the State(s) or Territory to which your use of the Service relates;

(b) you have a signed authority to sell from the owner or vendor (such as an Agency Agreement or Authority to Sell); and

(c) you are authorised to make available the material uploaded or submitted to use the Service;

(d) you will not allow another real estate office in your real estate group to list the property using your subscription. Where a proprietor of a property authorises multiple real estate offices in your real estate group to list a property you acknowledge that:

(i) this does not entitle you to authorise any other person (including, without limitation, any associated offices in your real estate group) to make use of the one subscription; and
(ii) any such conduct is in breach of these Terms and Conditions; and

(e) you are providing the full range of agent services (as set out in our Private Listing Policy).

Whilst Lawyers Real Estate don’t appear to comply with this section of realestate.com.au’s T & C’s and their ability to continue to upload onto REA is up to the respective legal departments to sort out, one thing I noticed is that Lawyers Real Estate appears to have very little regard for wanting to comply with some of realestate.com.au’s AUP.

Under the realestate.com.au Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) – Residential, it would appear that REA don’t allow other website addresses to be promoted within the copy text of a property being advertised yet Lawyers Real Estate are currently including the URL www.SLOD.com.au within the body of the property text when uploading their listings which appears to be in breach of 4.1.6 the Misuse of fields.

Here’s a screen capture…http://screencast.com/t/YmU2ZTQwNTg

Misuse of fields
4.1.6. Placing irrelevant information in an information, description or picture field. You must only use the information, description or picture fields for inserting information that is intended for those fields. For example, inserting the name or contact details of your business or agency in the description header or property description field is not acceptable. Inserting a business or agency logo as a picture in a property listing is also not acceptable.  For copyright purposes, small watermarks are permissible on images, but only in one corner of the image. Superimposed wording or text is not permissible.

The SLOD.com.au URL provides a link to Lawyers Real Estate online service for bidding, making enquiries and booking inspections, etc. If the URL is allowed to continue to appear on Lawyers Real Estate’s listings under the legal interpretation of Clause 4.1.6 or other parts of the realestate.com.au AUP, it could then open the door for agents to feature website URL’s within the property text field.

What about Privacy Laws?

On top of that, uploading the seller’s contact phone number onto a public site like realestate.com.au is not only in breach of 4.1.24.2 in REA’s AUP but wouldn’t that also breach other Privacy Laws?

Here’s a screen capture…http://screencast.com/t/NTczN2ZiOT

Note: For privacy reasons I have covered the seller’s name & contact number.

Other inappropriate content
4.1.24. Using the Service for any unlawful, illegal, malicious or improper purpose. For example: it is not acceptable to, in your use of the Service, display material that:

4.1.24.1. may defame or discredit another person or business;

4.1.24.2. may disclose private, personal or confidential information;

4.1.24.3. might be considered obscene, offensive, menacing or abusive;

4.1.24.4. might infringe the intellectual property rights of others;

4.1.24.5. may violate any law, regulation, standard, content requirements or code promulgated by any relevant authority or industry body.

I’m sure Peter Mericka of Lawyers Real Estate will be able to shed some light on how this is legally OK?

I’d also be interested to know if clients sign an agency agreement when they list with Lawyers Real Estate and whether the lawyers have signed an inspection report and included opinions of price on the property or do they simply rely on an independent valuer to assess the price for their clients.

And if so, is the registered valuation an added cost or is it included in their flat fee?

If Lawyers Real Estate has indeed found a loophole and they are allowed to continue without the normal licensing that a real estate agent has to have then as I mentioned earlier, it could open a huge can of worms and we could see a lot more lawyers opening up real estate agencies.

If this is allowed to continue then agents should really start to question why we are paying annual licensing fees to the government departments if they won’t police and legislate the licensing of the industry more effectively.

Plus, I’d be really interested to know how Lawyers Real Estate got to be on realestate.com.au in the first place?

Finally, I don’t have an issue with the discount commission model that Lawyers Real Estate are using because discount real estate agencies have been around for years and are now a dime a dozen, but it does concern me that some consumers may feel that going to a Lawyer to sell their property is going to mean that they feel protected and that they are going to get the best deal.

For example, here is a video of what some of Lawyers Real Estate clients have said…

If you’re considering employing a lawyer (either with or without a real estate licence) to sell your property then it’s important to remember that in the end they are in business and they will expect to get paid a commission.

And just because the negotiations are done by a lawyer doesn’t guarantee that it will always turn out to be the best thing for their client. Many legal deals end up being negotiated on the steps of court rooms and it’s not always the case that a Lawyer’s client walks away 100% happy with the end result.

Consumers still need to do their due diligence because in the legal profession, as per the real estate profession, some people get good representation and others get poor representation.

We are going to use this site www.silkwoodmedical.com.au. Silkwood Medical are a plastic surgery company based in Bondi Junction, Sydney. They built this website around 18 months ago and although the site looks very nice it does not rank well in search engines and therefore does not generate too much organic traffic. The site has no blog associated with it and news articles are posted to the website in pdf format.

Our solution was to create a blog which looked exactly the same as the client’s website and place the blog on a separate url www.silkwoodnews.com.au. The idea of this, is that a user will jump between blog and site or site and blog without realizing they have been redirected to a new url. The client would then post articles through the blog which will build up pages in search engines driving traffic back to the blog which in turn will direct traffic to the original site.

This has worked very well and the blog now rates high in search engines in many key words which the original website does not. Some of these key words included on the first page of Google for the blog are:

• macrolane sydney
• ulthera australia
• breast macrolane injections
• breast injections macrolane
• ultherapy cost
• ultherapy reviews
• cost of face ultherapy
• facial revolution
• macrolane breast enhancement sydney
• macrolane injections sydney
• skin tightening ulthera
• ulthera laser in sydney
• ulthera reviews
• ultherapy costs
• video ulthera

Because users now receive the Newsletter via email and a link back to the website, means traffic is driven to the blog. This is better for their business as readers are likely to view other information about their services and could lead to an increase in new business.

Unfortunately, the General Manager of the company left a few months ago so content has not been updated since then. However, the main Silkwood Website receives between 55% to 65% of its traffic from the blog site and this would spike significantly each time a post was created and an email sent to subscribers.

In summary, by attaching a blog to the website will increases the amount of pages and content in search engines resulting in increased traffic. Also, a great way to encourage users to frequent your website is to post your newsletter through your website, further increasing traffic.

Note: if you do not want to set up the blog on a new url you can cerate a sub-domain for the blog eg news.silkwoodmedical.com.au

Then there are the websites that are just about the reviews themselves.  On Business2 we have discussed a few of those over the years but there are always new ones popping up all the time. Some of the more popular ones include Google’s Place Pages, Truelocal.com.au and ProductReview.com.au. The one thing all of these have in common is that real estate agents are just a fraction of the businesses that are reviewed.

Recently a new website called PropertyScope has cropped up that has the sole purpose of providing reviews on real estate agencies and real estate salespeople.  Already some agencies are attracting poor reviews as are salespeople like Shane Howley, David Beauregard and Chantel Penny who probably have no idea of the comments and review that have been put up for anybody to see who searches their name.

I am totally in favour of open transparency but there has been a few things that have always bugged me about  these online review sites.

Competitors voting

These sites are always open to your competitor or their immediate family and close friends voting you down and them up. This was highlighed particularly well to me recently. I created the Australian Real Estate Software and Solutions directory and a few months back I integrated a voting system allowing  real estate agents to vote on these service companies.

Voting wise everything was going well till a voting war started out in a couple of the more popular categories whereby individuals from well known suppliers would rate 10 for their own company and  1 for every other company in that category. They did not even try to hide their votes by spreading them out or varying the votes. It was either a 10 or it was a 1. The 10′s (along with their IP’s) indicated exactly who they represented.

Whilst the majority did not partake everyone suffered with low ratings. I have since deleted all the “dud” votes and changed the voting security on the site and all votes coming from non registered visitors are now moderated and anything dodgy gets tossed.

Monitoring voting irregularities is  not easy with even just 100 or so entries but there are already 1000′s of salespeople and agents already listed on the site and potentially many more to come. I hope PropertyScope have increased the security settings of their ratings plugin to as high as possible to ensure the integrity of the voting process as that really is the key.

The opinions of the minority are not always representative of the majority

You can’t sell every property nor can you totally satisfy every owner or every buyer.  Generally once you have a significant amount of genuine votes the trends will sort themselves out  fairly accurately but when you only have a limited number of responses making statements like  ”On average, this agent: underquotes to buyers by 16%” as is currently displayed on one of those profiles is potentially misleading and damaging to the salespersons’s reputation.

I believe that PropertyScope should be careful how they display this sort of data and make generalised claims.

No right of reply

Some of these review sites have no right of reply or the ability to provide perspective on the comments. One of the best examples of this is ebay where sellers can reply to a bad rating. Similarly bad ratings can be withdrawn should cooler heads prevail and or the seller rectify the problem which triggered the bad rating.

PropertyScope does not seem to have any of these balancing features in place which is a shame.

Whether PropertyScope is successful or not remains to be seen but I think agents need to quickly realise that public viewable reviews of their performance is here to stay. Proactive agents will harness this  and use it to their advantage whilst the others are try to deal with reactively and sit back and pray that some good reviews will be posted instead of bad ones.

Online Reputation Management is really turning into a new skill set that agents have to develop themselves or contract out because just a handful of bad reviews spread across just a few websites could tarnish an agents reputation overnight.

Google Rich Snippets

Google has created a service called Google Rich Snippets which takes public review results like and returns them in the  search results.  They always show at the very top of the search results and boy do they stand out.  PropertyScope has set their rankings system up with Google Rich Snippets in place so very soon when you search for your agency or the names of your salespeople it could show something like this

(preview created using the Rich Snippets Testing Tool)

I was speaking at an event yesterday where one of the agents mentioned the CommBank Property Guide iPhone App and the significant amount of data that was now being made available via realestate.com.au and RPData.

As the discussion went on, one of the agents logged on and started searching through the Comm Bank’s app. Only by fluke, another agent suggested they take a look at one of his latest listings which is going up for Auction.

The listing agent was absolutely horrified to see that the property which was uploaded onto realestate.com.au as an auction now appeared on Comm Bank’s app with an asking price displayed.

The price that was displayed on the Comm Bank app was the same price that the agent had inserted under the search price field.

Any pricing entered within the search price field has always been a hidden price whether a property goes up for auction or whether it has an asking price. These prices have never been for public viewing, or at least until now.

I was blown away when the agent showed me the listing in question on the Commbank site. I couldn’t believe that something so fundamental and basic could be breached.

I followed up with the agent again today. To REA’s credit the pricing issue for that listing has now been rectified but in typical fashion the agent was told that it’s not their fault the issue seemed to be from CommBank’s side? So who’s fault is it really?

Agents don’t have an agreement with CommBank’s Property Guide app, they have an agreement with REA Group.

Under the circumstances, should agents have the option to not make listings, etc available to Comm Bank’s app?

Is this only an isolated case? Has it happened to others? Will it happen again? Can REA Group and Comm Bank guarantee that no such issue will ever happen again?

Can you imagine what would have happened if the vendor had seen it? Who knows whether a buyer has seen it or not? Does this mean that agents have to check every listing on every site that their data is being uploaded to?

NOTE: Out of respect for the agent and the vendor trying to sell their property I have deliberately left out the specific details of the price, property, area, agent, etc because sharing that information could have a detrimental impact on the result of the property auction.

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.

Politics

Kevin ‘Stone the Crows’ Rudd has proved just how easy it is to get fired these days. I thought he was doing a ‘heck’ of a job and was never given a ‘fair shake of the sauce bottle’. Julia Gillard could have at least waited until another 400 studies were completed, or after he formed at least another 300 working groups. At least now he can eat his earwax in peace!

So now we have Tony Abbott who is trying to prove his worth to the women of Australia and a woman who is trying to prove that she is a woman to the men of Australia.

Billy Connolly said it best. “The drive to ever want to become a politician, should ban you for life from ever being one”.

Real Estate Market

The market is picking up out here. We sold a property the other day, which gives us 100% growth over the past month, people just don’t want to ‘invest’ in salty dust farms anymore, the kids of today!

To be honest, it isn’t that bad, we have quite a few young guns out this way doing all that organic stuff. You know what I mean, cage a chicken for 6 months then take it outside for a day, let it run around and slit its throat, you know, organic!

Marketing

So, Simon Baker has a new business. Isn’t he the guy who ‘rescued’ realestate.com.au when they were so down and out and living on lentils and dust? Then built them into the greatest company ever worth billions and trillions before leaving them to sell everything he had built? Now he wants me to list my properties for sale on global websites to open them up to potential international buyers?

Technology

iPhones, iPads, iMonkeys? It’s all junk to avoid having real conversations with other human beings. I have a process, a person calls me with interest in a property. I show them the property, I invite them for dinner (it’s not a short drive here) and they don’t leave until they sign. Once they move in, they are a friend for life – whether they like it or not! You see, all of my business comes from people’s mouths, go and see Les, you gotta talk to Les! That’s connecting folks!

Celebrities

So Peter sends me a list of things I could possibly talk about. For one I have never heard of Lindsay Lohan and could not give a #@$! about her. Mel Gibson I know, he seemed like a decent fella, so he is involved in this #$@%storm with some girl (I didn’t even know he split from his wife, who seemed like the type of woman you would never split from)

Here is how I see it. Private conversations, private discussions, private arguments are private. My interest ends there. If he breaks the law she should go to the police and if he has done something wrong he gets to go to jail or get’s a slap, it’s that simple folks.

Now, the only time I show interest if the person who is involved in these things makes themselves to publicly be something they are not (read politicians etc).

One person I do know about is Tiger Woods. Now this guy plays golf, I never heard him stand up and say “I am the greatest husband or father and you should watch me play golf”. Or that “marriage is sacred, watch me play golf!”. He plays golf, gets a lot of money to do it, but that’s all he really does. As long as he is not breaking the law, my interest ends there!

Now I have spent far too much time being serious and now I am ^$&^$### off!

Television

There is nothing to watch, seriously, everything makes me angry, aside from breakfast shows and a little sports and news, it’s completely useless. I would rather sit on my porch with my dog and a single malt than listen to most of the crap on TV. Useless!

Religion

Now I am a good catholic boy and one thing I know as a good catholic boy is that you never talk about religion to people you don’t know – period!

Economy

Yeah it sucks a little, everything costs more and people just seem to live to work these days. My advice. Do your time in the city, earn a penny or two and then come and watch sunsets in the country, you will never regret it.

The creation and success of an industry based portal is an issue that has been hotly debated on Business2 in the past, as has realestateVIEW.com.au’s ability to be a significant force in the market.   I believe that our latest acquisition proves how serious we are about delivering a valuable product to the industry and our members.  This news coupled with the recent content sharing agreement with REIWA.com.au (which allows Western Australian properties to be displayed on the RealestateVIEW.com.au site) will provide a huge increase in coverage nationally.

So why have we acquired MyHome.com.au?

This new arrangement provides several opportunities for our business, however in particular MyHome.com.au provides us with 2 key advantages;

1)      Strength In New States – After recently launching in NSW, the new arrangement will add significant strength to content in these states as well as providing a large boost in Queensland where the site is yet to officially launch.

2)      Complementing our Existing Services – For realestateVIEW.com.au this sale will complement our existing offering for estate agents around Australia.   With a captive audience in NSW and QLD through MyHome.com.au we are able to extend our reach and exposure for the many new agents coming on board to the realestateVIEW.com.au site.

It is exciting times ahead for Australia’s industry owned portal and we hope the industry is as excited about this as we are.

As Petra Sprekos explains on Property Portal Watch the “acquisition complements realestateview.com.au’s existing offering for estate agents and consumers and will substantially increase content”. It will be interesting to see whether Myhome will remain free for agents to list properties.

This is very exciting, as now an Industry based portal is the 3rd largest in Australia and should start gathering real momentum to have a shot at Domain.

Firstly, I have to say that the App itself is very impressive. I love iPhone Apps that “use” the functionality of the handset. Too many Apps are just conservative, dry extensions of the company’s website (see Domain’s App as a good example of this). They’re functional, they do a job, but are pretty uneventful, never interactive and pretty boring. The Comm Bank App uses every ounce of the handset’s horse power, and is the better for it.

Augmented reality (using the camera, GPS and orientation gizmo) is mind blowing, user friendly and very useful. During the live demo they took us outside and we stood outside a property that was for sale, pointed the camera at the property, and everything came to life…… so much information at your fingertips. You can search in more traditional ways, but the AR was the real show stopper.

Secondly, another masterstroke is buddying up with RPData and realestate.com.au for content. I’ll let you download it and judge for yourself, but it’s the sort of App that one of the portals SHOULD have created, and didn’t.

I applaud Comm Bank for a job well done (and for the great coffee at the launch).

Creative Commons licenses allows you to publish your work online, while letting others know exactly what they can, and can’t do with your work. You keep your copyright but allow people to copy and distribute your work provided they give you credit.

CC is already having an absolutely enormous impact on the creative production environment, for instead of having to use library music – or processed tracks offered up in Garage Band or Sound Track Pro – video production houses are now be able to access a whole world of talent.

CC applies to almost everything. It strives to provide undiscovered talent with a global stage – via the Internet. How will it apply to your marketing collateral?

The photographs you commission tomorrow; the words you have your copywriters draft; the video content your production companies deliver – is it Creative Commons?

What’s the impact?