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.

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.

Click to Enlarge

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.

That it turns out was Ray White and accordingly I have used them as a baseline  for this first comparison. If you want to compare another industry brand yourself that I have not included make sure you include Ray White in the website to compare, region of Australia, select 2009 and then the Real Estate Category as per this screenshot below (click to enlarge).

Google Insights for Search only allows you to do 5 searches at a time so each search was done with Ray White to keep the baseline accurate and then all results were manually collated to show us the following results.

Google Insights also lets us look at the trend for each brand. The following graphs show the change for 2009 to date in groups of 5. Each graph also has a category line for Real Estate (black line) which is a common baseline to compare them against.

Also, please note the “Totals” differ to those above because they are ranking only the brands listed and there is not common baseline used such as Ray White above. You can click on the trending graphs to view a larger version.

The last thing that Google Insights lets us have a look at for brand awareness is a breakdown to a state level. In the following examples we look at each of the brands and how they fair in each state.

The darker the colour the stronger that brand is in that state.

(edit: You should only use these to compare the strength of a brand in one state to another.  You cannot compare one brands to another brand using these maps.  See the comments below)

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?

Domain Simply Adorable!
Domain launched Adore to hot discussion. Even Simon Baker joined in on the comments but what’s happened to Adore since then?
The Times they are a Changin!
Fairfax released the online newspaper in Brisbane the www.brisbanetimes.com.au which has consistently held a daily audience of around 40,000 unique visitors per day since launch. The good news is that they have not gone backwards one step… however the bad news is that it is not significantly improved either. So is this a success or failure or a little bit of both??
News Ltd Newspapers Property Sections Rebranded as realestate.com.au
A bunch of real estate sections in bunch of newspapers changed there logo…. so what? I doubt this increased readership or visitor counts to either but it made somebody somewhere feel warm and fuzzy.  Can anybody say they actually felt an impact from this?
Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water!
Another topic that erupted in the comments, REA in a huge touch of arrogance decided to launch the “Peak Industry Body” – The REAIAC which stands for REA Industry Advisory Council. How anybody could call this an industry body is beyond me, but has anybody heard anything that has come out of this Adivsory Council all was it all hot air as so many claimed?
Google Buys REA
Peter was taken hook line and sinker, if you have never read this, take a minute and put a smile on your dial.
Now this is what you call a Property Video!
Propvid really started caputuring everyone attention and video started to look as though it has promise but even today there are few of the 10,000 or so agents in this country who are using video. Professional photography seems to have gained greater penetration for 2008 however video’s day appears to be a lot closer. We were given the opportunity to experience a propvid recently and was very impressed. We are hoping to do a lot more and have added it as a standard part of our marketing plans. 2009 for video maybe??
First National Conference by Glenn
Andrew Taylor from REA advised that REA felt their biggest threat came from Truelocal. Andrew must have been looking way into the future because Truelocal has lost visitor numbers since that time and hardly looks as though it will light the world on fire. In fact despite all the whizz bang features, it is HotFrog that has set the business directory world on fire their visitor traffic coming from nowhere to twice that of Truelocal. So who is REA’s biggest threat?? Anybody?
Homehound re- launch

and
Whats Dumb? Homehound Google campaign!
Ho hum. Homehound is still a pretender on the scene and only a sneaky and dirty tricks adwords campaign seemed to get them any traffic. Using the registered business names of real estate agents to imitate the agent and steal their traffic was a way to ensure they did not pay the high adwords for the typical “<suburb> real estate” keywords that everyone else competes over.. Is anybody still being targetted by this tactic??