In part due to low usage, the proliferation of excellent property-search tools on real estate websites, and the infrastructure challenge posed by the impending retirement of the Google Base API (used by listing providers to submit listings), we’ve decided to discontinue the real estate feature within Google Maps on February 10, 2011.

This is a huge win for the Australian subscription based portals like Realestate.com.au and Domain.com.au who were threatened by Google and their model. While for the smaller free subscription based portals like Homehound, Watersidepropertysales, TheHomepage and all the franchise networks, it is one less source of free traffic to their websites.

Looking at it from an Industry wide position, I guess it reflects how competitive and innovative the real estate technology sector is.

So, in the United States, Agents ‘doing it themselves’ is common place – assisted by new technology which sees kids in prams texting. Now Americans aren’t exactly what you’d call a camera-shy race. From taking their own photographs to shooting their own video – on an iphone, or a Flip – which you can upload to a site to take care of all the editing and the streaming – all for $29, the US market is flooded with ‘do it yourself’ and ‘host it yourself’ collateral.

Just one example:

Click here to view video. There’s even film-making and script-writing courses at HD Hat. In reviewing these ‘home’ movies, you have to say, they do the job. If you were interested in buying a particular home, I think they certainly show you enough of the property to make a judgement call on whether or not you phone the agent.
Add to this Google Maps and Street View, and buyers do have a vast arrange of free tools at their disposal.

From a Vendor’s perspective, why invest any money in quality marketing materials or even mass media for that matter. Just do it yourself and launch it to YouTube. Which raises another question; if marketing professions are being made redundant by technology, will ‘Agenting’ and negotiating skills follow? But if quality doesn’t really count, why has Google added a High Quality criteria to its searches for video? And why do big Companies spend millions on new creatives if any video describing a product will do?

Guess Jeans goes to awesome lengths, with multi-million dollar campaigns, just to sell a pair of pants yet most home-owners agonize over spending a few thousand to sell a million dollar asset.

The US housing market is a total mess. Making it ‘Cheap and easy’ to not only own a home – but sell one – hasn’t worked. Will Australian Agents ‘Flip’ over doing it themselves?

Guest Author: Brett Clements from Platinum HD

Here is the official Google press release from Google.

Around half of the Googlers in our Sydney headquarters are software engineers, working on some really cool things – Google Wave, App Engine, Google Docs, and of course, Google Maps.

Recently, some of us have been working on a particularly interesting project that combines Google Maps and search technology – we’ve been trying to work out if your search query in Google Maps means you’re interested in having current real estate listings returned to you. It’s nice to get to work on some ‘search’ engineering down here!

So here’s what we’ve been cooking up – in the past, if you wanted to view real estate listings on Google Maps, your best bet was to select “Real Estate…” from the “More” menu at the top of the map.

Now, simply searching for “real estate” will return, well, real estate (try it)! You could also try “homes for sale sydney” or “homes for rent adelaide“. Or while you’re at it, check out “apartments for sale brisbane“, or “homes for rent near perth“. The idea is to make it really easy for you guys – you tell us what you want, and we get it back to you! Of course, we’ll continue to work to return the best results for all your Google Maps queries, whether you’re looking for local businesses, geographic features, or your perfect home.

We also wanted to tell you about the integration of real estate listings with Place Pages. Now clicking the “more info” link next to a listing takes you to a faster, easier-to-read page that gives you all of the information we have about a listing: photos, inspection times, videos, details, a Street View preview and nearby public transit information if available, allowing you to quickly find the listing you want and click through to the sources of the listing.

We hope you find these features improve your real estate search experience on Google Maps.

Credit Note: Thanks to Craig from www.baseestate.com for the heads up

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

Reading between the lines Google, REA & Domain could stand to make a lot of money out of this deal. My theory is that a deal could be happening based around an Adsense style commission paid to REA & Domain.

Google makes most of its money through Pay Per Click advertising.

As PPC advertising became more & more popular Google ended up with more ads than ad impressions simply because people rarely searched past the first page on Google.

To solve this problem Google came up with Adsense. This enabled Google’s ads to appear on external websites by paying the website owner a percentage of the advertising revenue generated from their site.

Since launching real estate search on Google Maps, Google have been able to expand their potential online advertising space at the mind blowing rate of approx. 1 million pages.

For example, when you click on any one of the listings on Google Maps & then click the More Info link you’ll see 4 tabs – Overview, Details, Photos & Web Pages.

On each of these pages there is a vacant area to the right or at the bottom that is just screaming out for the Sponsored Links to appear.

If you look closely on the Web Pages page you’ll notice that as more sites feed their listings on, more Web Pages links like Homehound, MyHome, the agents website, etc appear down the page. This automatically expands the currently vacant area on the right hand side of this page. Just waiting for Google to turn on the Sponsored Links switch.

At first I couldn’t understand why Google would display numerous feeds for the one listing but now I get it.

The whole thing is a brilliantly devised concept by Google to expand their PPC advertising space. They’ve even designed it in such a way that they get 4 or 5 pages of advertising per property listing.

With Google reporting hundreds of thousands of listings being uploaded since the launch that adds up to approx. 1 million pages that they can now advertise on, with a lot more on their way as they roll this concept out globally.

And with total control over where they place their sponsored links Google will want every listing they can get. That’s why Google won’t charge agents to upload their listings & it’s also the reason why they will allow private sellers.

When you think about it REA & Domain have virtually all the online listings in Australia & getting a feed from them would be extremely lucrative to Google & will add millions of extra pages to their site, so it makes sense that Google will probably pay an Adsense style of commission to REA & Domain to have their listings feed.

So all I’m wondering now is what’s the deal? And how much more money do REA & Domain stand to make out of real estate agents’ listings?

Google Street View is an added feature of their highly popular Google Maps that provides 360° panoramic views of the street at ground level. It was launched in May this year in the US for a limited number of cities which has been slowly expanded.

The images are taken by specially modified cars that take the images from a rooftop mounted camera and record the location of each photos by GPS. When taking millions of images at street level of a city you are bound to catch some amazing things and there are many websites that have sprung up to highlight some of the best images and one of the best is Google Street View Sightings. Google has caught abortion protests, break and enters and people in compromising positions. Australian privacy laws are a little more strict than the US and it is expected that Google will have to blur the faces and car number plates of anyone photographed.

Google Street View allows a lot of possibilities for real estate agents. In the US some agents are providing a link direct to the street view of a property on their website so potential buyers can get a feel for the neighbourhood.

When it was announced I cringed and I was given a call by both of the major players; truelocal.com.au and mylocal.com.au and I basically made the telephone sales person back peddle a mile from their original pitch, unfortunately many Australians were fooled into thinking that this may be of benefit to them. Now it is 12 months on and many of these people will be due for renewal, I can see prices dropping all over the place.

Why? Well you can have all of this for FREE. Google Maps has been released in Australia for a few short months. All you need to do is:

1. Register: (you will need a free Google Gmail Account)
2. Edit your Details – make sure you include as much information as possible, have you logo ready, and some information about your company)
3. Wait about 10 days to receive a letter from Google with your code to verify your address. Then login and add your code and your listing will be up on the directory in no time.

So truelocal and mylocal are finished at these prices, and I am glad for it. I remember years ago WIN Television released a product called mydirectory.com.au which has since gone bust along with the quote ‘before its time’ from the owners. Yes, we are now all ready to put a virtual tour of our business on a directory for $700 bucks a year – pathetic!

Here is my message to big business. If you want to make money online provide real value to your target market and your audience first and the art of making money second then make sure you give them all a reason to go back, then employ people who actually know what they are doing.

Another good thing to come out of this is that Sensis will have to work a hell of allot harder to get people to renew their Yellow Pages and the price increases they have enjoyed over the years will soon be a thing of the past – all it takes is businesses to think. Think about what cost and the return these types of ads bring to your business.

I am not saying they do not have a place – but the value is just totally out of touch with the reality. So get onto Google Maps Australia, might not be much in the short term but it will be of benefit in the long term!

In this case it is mapping.

Realestate.com.au have now upgraded their mapping system to be included in search results and I must say whilst it is not perfect, it is pretty darn good.

One thing I can say is that Domain.com.au (whilst the first of the majors to do this) must now continue to develop their mapping solution.

Realestate.com.au‘s solution includes all of the properties from your search, so if you searched a wide area it includes all o the listings from the one pop up. This is the first time I have seen anyone do this and it is impressive.

Domain have included Sold listings on a map and this too is a great feature and one that may upset realestate.com.au‘s plans to sell this information to consumers.

The only problems I see with recent sales data is the accuracy of these results as I know many agents just put approximates in their sales results and the fact that I wonder how it is monitored as many vendors do not like this information made public.

Domain‘s information however does not come from their system, but from homepriceguide.com.au and I am sure realestate.com.au will want to do the same but keep it in-house, or purchase one of the many of these types of businesses on the market.

Before the end of the year we will see more portals hit the Australian market including realmap.com.au which is still far ahead of these services offered by the portals – the only thing they cannot match is content and I for on are hoping that agents will embrace their model…

Now, I have seen a mapping site that has just blown me away. It uses data from realestate.com.au/domain.com.au and uses the Microsoft Virtual Earth Mapping Service.

The Spyk site is basically a mash-up, which is taking data from a variety of sources such as Virtual Earth. The user gets a mapping system and a simple search tools.

Notice how most of the screen is made up of the map. You can move the map by clicking and dragging the map and you can also zoom in and out.

It is a wonderful example of what is to come and although this will no doubt raise the ire of the major portals domain.com.au and realestate.com.au and possible legal action (which in my view they will find hard to win but too expensive to fight for Spyk).

The site is only in its beta release and does have its annoyances but it has raised the bar in terms of interface and structure!

Click here to view the site……

Elizabeth raised a wonderful question in regards to advertising and mapping. She is worried that a mapping site will just be covered in advertising. Firstly we need to look at the current market leader realestate.com.au.

I am going to ignore the celebrations going on on realestate.com.au’s site (site pretty much shuts down in Firefox browser until balloons finish loading – 10% of visitors)

I have marked out in pink all of the advertising on the home page of realestate.com.au and this is not including pop ups!

The home page is about 420 kilobytes in size, which takes around 15 seconds to load with basic broadband and 6 months (about 80 seconds really) on a 56k modem.

So in answer to Elizabeth’s worry about mapping sites being free and using an advertising model that carries too much advertising, I think we can safely say that they will not go to this extreme.

There is no model for success in this area as it is totally new, but I will let everyone know what I think they should be like for the user.
1. Large Resizable Map: The map must resizable both horizontally and vertically. This is the most important thing for the user in my opinion. Bothy domain and realestate.com.au have it in a small box, which in my opionion is useless for the user. Also why should people with larger monitors suffer because a section of the population (less than 24% have small 800 x 600 monitor sizes? This way it suits everyone. 1024 + is becoming the norm (+60% of users have this size or larger) and many people have much larger monitors these days as prices have plumetted over the past 2 years.

2. Main Header: This should carry logo and contact information of the portal and other links to portal pages.
3. Search Header: Below the main header should be the search header, is could pop down using AJAX and it should carry all the tools the users need for searching.

4. Information Layers: Above the footer should be information layers that carry additional information that the user may find useful such as local schools shopping centres etc

5. Footer: Carries other pages and policies, terms of use etc and also contact details.

6. Advertising: Each property pop up would carry only 1 advertisement and it is short a brief and non intrusive.

So this in my opinion should be the norm for this kind of development. It still can be sexy, but it must be functional for the user.

Getting agents on board is another thing altogether, but services like HubOnline, Portplus and my company Agentpoint export to many different sites and I am sure that the new Realmap site will be added to their export list.