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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Most major real estate groups will conduct regular brand surveys to gauge just how their brand is positioned into the marketplace. They are normally conducted through expensive surveys. Results often include statistics for prompted and unprompted  awareness of your brand.  Naturally these reports focus on the brand that engaged them… the group paying the bill.  They always seem to emphasise the good news and rarely position the brand to the whole industry.

One way to measure a brands effectiveness is what the public are actually searching for. Google released a product awhile back called Google Insights for Search which you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties.

Google Insight gives us a great way to compare the relative brand strength of different brands right around the country and even broken down into each state.  Please note that this represents how many people are searching for these names and in no way represents web traffic. Realestate.com.au and Domain.com.au would win on a pure traffic count hands down but when it comes to what the public searches for they are not the number one brand in Australia.
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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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