Inman News has reported that the LA Times newspaper is ceasing its publication of its weekly newspaper section. A section that has been a feature of the paper for over a century.  Read the full article here.

Like many newspapers around the world, the decline in revenues due to the take up of online technologies would have been one of the factors but I would suggest  it was further accelerated by the shocking real estate market in the states at the moment.  I cant see too many agents throwing money at any sort of advertising whilst they are not selling anything.
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REA Group today announced the departure of CEO and Managing Director - Simon Baker, effective immediately. Chief Financial Officer Georg Chmiel has been appointed as acting CEO until a replacement is announced.

This comes as a little bit of a shock, I honestly thought Simon would be around until he was poached by another company. The Chairman of REA Group Richard Freudenstein said,

“Over the past seven years REA has grown from a single Australian website into a world-leading online property company, with operations in 10 countries and publishing 22 websites and 8 print publications. Now the Board feels it is time for new leadership to take the business to the next level. The Board would like to thank Simon for his contribution to this success and we wish him well in his future endeavours.”

This announcement comes on top of some pretty impressive results. REA’s results for the fiscal year ended in June are astonishingly good.

- Revenue of between $152 million and $156 million (up by 41% to 46%)
- EBITDA of between $35 million and $37 million (up by 49% to 57%)
- More than 22,400 paying agents as at 30 June 08 (up by 5,400 paying agents from 30 June 07)

The New Replacement
Well if you look at the above figures, it is a pretty big ask. My guess if the board want to continue with this growth, then the next CEO will last less than 12 months, as I cannot see that % of growth continuing.

Simon Baker
I have dealt with Simon Baker on a number of occasions over the years and whilst we disagreed on a range of issues, he has always been available for a chat. I wish him well in his future endeavours. He will have leave big shoes and even higher expectations for his successor.

We are all too busy looking forward that we sometimes forget to look back.

I needed to find an old article recently in the archives recently and came across some articles that I thought would be worth a revisit. I started around 18 months ago and looked forward about a year and came up with the following little gems:-
Realestate.com.au release REA Labs
This technology sandpit as REA call it is as Peter pointed out at the time, a complete rip off Google Labs and appears to have dont nothing since the day it was launched. Not even a vista sidebar gadget. The lack of action appears to make a mockery of the original “Global Innovator” tag they put on themselves at the time. My browser tells me this page has not been updated for around 9 months or so.
Google to Launch Real Estate Beta in 2007?
2007 looked as though it was going to be Google Real Estate’s year but not only did it not arrive, but we are on the back half of 2008 and there seems no solution in sight. Will it still happen?
Private selling sites - growing up!
Zero Agents produced a private selling site with a bit of style however in hindsight the anti agent rhetoric has proven to be full of hot air, at least in our neck of the woods. I seen my first zeroagents sign the other day. Has anybody seen zeroagents make an impact in their marketplace?

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Realestateworld.com.au has been slowly building up their presence in the market, a few nights ago Win TV aired this peice on Realestateworld.com.au and their paper property guide. Its seems quite a few real estate agents jumped off the Fairfax owned property guide and went with Real Estate World.

More competition means lower prices and there are endless markets across Australia where this can have a huge effect on the big media operators News Limited and Fairfax. Click on link below to watch video.

Fairfax Digital have been wrapped over the knuckles by the ACCC and have agreed not to advertise as ‘FREE’ a new mobile search service launched by Domain.com.au.

Using the advertised service users of the site could view properties from domain.com.au on their mobile phone (http://m.domain.com.au)and receive ‘free’ SMS alerts. Only one problem, SMS alerts actually cost the user 0.55c per alert and of course downloading or viewing listings on your mobile phone could also incur charges under most pathetic data plans offered by Telco’s, which is nothing short of pathetic.

I have a spanking new 16G iPhone and the service is quite good. Pity that about a 1/4 of the screen is taken up by ads from Commonwealth Bank and links on property pages to Home Loans (which by big thumb clicked on average 3 times per listing by accident). Still it is another one up on REA and I have to say the RSS feed service from Domain.com.au (for searches) is a beauty and saves a lot of time for myself/my friends and this has been up for a long time now and not replicated on REA.

So apart from a totally misleading advert (who from Fairfax seriously thought this one would get past the umpire?) it is quite a nice little service. I am still completely unconvinced about mobile phones for real estate - despite so many companies pushing it as I have not seen anything truly ground breaking (or useful) in this space.

In other news: Cuil goes live
A new search engine developed by some seasoned ex Google employees went live. Cuil.com is the new service and it is glaringly lacking in Australian content but getting some serious coverage on news websites. Has some nice features, but nothing really exciting here.