Slowly but surely Google Real Estate is making inroads into the Australian real estate market with the recent signing of LJ Hooker on top of most of the major players in real estate in Australia. It will take longer for all of the smaller independent agents to come onboard, however it is clear that this is the beginning of a new era and it is time REA and Domain stepped up to the plate and opened themselves up to the Google way of life!

Why? Because not doing so will slowly end their dominance and when the decline occurs it will be so fast that no maneuvering will make a difference.

Some may argue that Google Real Estate has not made a difference as yet, but these people live in complete denial and it will only be a matter of time before visitor numbers begin declining and Google Real Estate begins its upward March.

Remember, Google only has to get comparative data to make a difference. Google also have a far greater capacity to let people know about it than all other real estate portals in the world combined.

Recently a number of videos have been produced that well and truly show how serious Google is about maps and real estate.

Finding a house on Google Real Estate Maps

Here is one to showcase real estate listings throughout Australia

Here is one on how to refine your real estate search on Google Real Estate.

Real Estate API’s
Realestate.com.au and domain.com.au must open their databases up to the general public to create a whole new wave of web and mobile applications.

I have been pushing API’s with these portals for over 2 years and yet we still have nothing. Maybe Realestate.com.au’s big announcement will include an API?

What can an API do?
As an example any website would be able to carry listings through this API, so community websites, industry websites, councils, agents, even business2.com.au would be able to carry listings, sales data etc. Portals do not need agents permission as agents have signed away all rights to the data when they join these sites.

Signing up should be simple and approval rapid and it should be accompanied by rapidly evolving documentation and examples.

Boon for portals
One other thing we will see is innovation across the board, even things we have not even thought of will take us by surprise, but the biggest boon will be for the portals. It will extend their listings and sales data reach and allow that data to be ingrained across 10’s of thousands of websites across Australia and the world.

Versions
There should be two versions of the API, the free version which carries 3rd parties adverts from the portals and is a little limited and then a paid version that carries no advertising and allows the user to do whatever they want with the data!

Flow on
The flow on effect of this will flow across the industries to jobs, cars and classifieds.

Will this happen?
Don’t hold your breath, large organisations are slow at moving on these opportunities, usually waiting until it is too late. We are fast approaching a time where I think realestate.com.au and domain.com.au will start going backwards unless they really innovate with API’s.

One only has to look at the music industry and the movie industry to see how stubborn incumbents completely ruin their own industries by not embracing and innovating.

54 Comments »

One of the big complaints by real estate agents when the Google Real Estate service started up was that the 2nd and 3rd tier real estate portals were actively pushing the agents properties to Google as well. Agents where uploading property portals like Homehound, Myhome and Onthehouse who were then turning around and re-uploading the same properties to Google

When several sources upload the same property to Google they apparently use the Pagerank system to work out who is the default page to display. Whilst all options are available when you press the “more info” option the majority of the traffic would be to the default link and in most cases the default link is not back to the agent, but to one of these portals. Ideally an agent wants this traffic to come back to their own website.

Many agents found the only way to guarantee their own link was seen on Google Real Estate was to stop uploading to these free portals. This was a little bit like cutting your nose off to spite your face. The free portals might not bring you the same enquiry levels as the top 2 subscription portals but as a value proposition it’s hard not to use them. It really became an either/or situation and unfortunately for the Free portals the power of Google’s reputation won out and they were shut off by an increasing number of agents.

We currently use Portplus and it’s as easy as unticking a box to shut off a feed to one of these portals.

There has been enough agents switching them off that Homehound now offers the option not to re-upload your properties to Google if you ask them and Myhome should have the option in place by next week.

If your considering canceling the free portals to improve your own results on Google Real Estate then I would suggest you give them a call first. Now you might be able to have your cake and eat it too!

24 Comments »

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

2 Comments »

In my previous post, ‘Online Reviews Set To Impact Real Estate Agents’, I mentioned how customer reviews appearing right beside a real estate agent Google Search could ultimately impact which real estate agent a customer may decide to employ. Click here to view previous article

But what if the customer reviews actually appeared right beside your company website?
Read the rest of this article »

45 Comments »

The Australian Real Estate Portals Survey is now closed and the results are in.  Overall we had over 500 people who viewed the survey and 92 participants complete it in full. None of the questions were compulsory and not every question was answered by everybody.

Several of the questions required choices to be selected against 16 real estate portals.  I tried to include a collection from the subscription, free, state based and niche portals, specifically the luxury portals.

Performance

It’s probably no surprise to anyone but the portal with the overall best result on performance was realestate.com.au with less than 15% of people indicating they were dissatisfied by their performance and over 68% claiming they were satisfied or very satisfied with their performance. The small remainder had a neutral response.

In contrast Domain had a significantly larger 27% of people dissatisfied and a lower 40% satisfied. Still we are talking about performance  here and Domain still delivers so all in all fairly good results in comparison to the rest of the portals. Domain Prestige on the other hand gave a pretty poor result. Despite the fact that only 20 people actually provided a rating only one person indicated they were satisfied by their performance.

Homehound and Myhome came in pretty similar with around 50 people providing a rating. Both have a few more people dissatisfied than they do satisfied but the most popular result response was in the middle with Neutral. I guess you can read into that they are doing an Ok job!

Google Real Estate had just 20% of participants indicate they were dissatisfied but a massive 37.5% indicated they were satisfied. That performance satisfaction rating was nearly as good as Domain’s and is really quite surprising. In just a few weeks I cant see how Google would be close to Domain on a performance level. Then you have the fact that Google just passes on the inquiry to their own website or one of the other portals so it would be pretty hard for the average agent to quantify the results from Google Real Estate.

Whilst the number of respondents for the two free luxury portals were a lot lower those that did respond did not find much to be satisifed about the performance in either Millionplus or Luxuryhomes.com.au.  The three state based real estate portals provided a mixed bag of results. The number of respondents for each was naturally much lower but Realestateview.com.au was the standout performer followed by REIWA and a relatively poor results for realestateworld who struggled with only two people wishing to record satisfied results.

Read the rest of this article »

11 Comments »

Realestate.com.au released their statistics on the prior month as they always do but something was different this time. It wasn’t that it was a record month, they have claimed many records in past fact sheets.. highest visitors, highest gap, highest percentage… You name it – they have found every way to claim they are number 1.

What is interesting is in this latest email they have ONLY compared themselves to Domain.com.au. In the past they have always included at least one and sometimes up to to 3 and 4 other real estate portals. Here is the last 5 months results but everyone I still have access to is the same.

You would have thought that Google’s entry to the market is the hot topic so they would have tried to claim a dominance over those that uploaded to Google rather than pick on their old foe.

Why is this so significant? Because realestate.com.au and domain.com.au are the only significant sites not uploading to Google Real Estate and that has been the “new phase” over the past month.

Could it be that some of those portals that jumped on the Google opportunity have started to show results already and they don’t want to flash it around?

Unfortunately I don’t have access to any July stats  so lets just a take a look at June on Google Trends.

As you can see realestate.com.au has remained fairly flatline. This is typically what you would see over any 30 day period as trends in website traffic are normally more evident over longer periods but lets take a look at myhome.com.au

There is a clear trend upwards here so they entered July on a significant increase in the prior 4 week period. The beginning of the month the average was about 2.4k unique visitors per day and by the end of the month the average was about 3.3k unique visitors per day. This would represent an increase of 37.5% in just a few weeks. I am not aware of any special campaign or promotion that myhome.com.au has been running so this must be a natural increase as myhome gains further popularity.

Now Realestate.com.au is going to argue that their traffic is massively larger and increase or not it does not matter to them. It certainly is but you have to view everything in perspective. Their traffic is certainly about 40 to 45 times greater but they have to share that amongst far more properties and far more agents. Now realestate.com.au claims that Google has only 20% of the total listings available in Australia. When you consider that Myhome is only one uploader to Google they obviously have far less than 20% of the property numbers of realestate.com.au.

So if they have 1/40th of the traffic being distributed amongst just 1/5 of the properties it means that your traffic per property is at least around 12.5% of realestate.com.au. That gap is actually not as far away as REA would have you believe and if Myhome can continue that sort of growth then it will close significantly. If all of the free options start making up ground its going to make an interesting marketplace over the next 12 months.

It will be interesting to see what adding the Google factor into July’s results did for Myhome but since REA did not want to share, we will have to wait a month.

On an associated matter, I really cant stand the use of the word property seekers. It implies individual people which in turn implies that nearly 5 million Australians looked at realestate.com.au. In fact nothing could be further from the truth. Their monthly statistics are formulated by adding the daily unique visitors. If somebody checks realestate.com.au every single day from their home computer whilst they are looking to purchase they could represent as much as 31 of these “Property seekers”. If they check it from home and from work then they could represent as much as 62 of these property seekers. Since it is daily uniques that is what they should quote. If they want to quote property seekers for a month then they should quote unique monthly visitors. Because some people will visit daily, some will visit a few times a month and others will visit from work, home and mobile… my gut feeling is that will be much closer to 400-500,000 people.

************************************************************

UPDATED

I have had some interesting feedback from realestate.com.au’s PR department today questioning my take on how the 4.8 mill in the last paragraph is calculated. The state that the 4.8million is monthly unique browsers but the catch is I have to take their word for it for now but they are trying to find something to confirm to send me so we can clear it up.   If they were to quote the figures the way I have suggested it would be more like around 12 million. I suggested she post her response to the article.. but she declined.

For those that use Google Analytics it now shows something called an “Absolute Unique Visitor” figure for the report. If you click on that report it will show you the unique visitors for each day that make up the report but if you add up the individual numbers for each day they do not equal the total for the month of the report.

Google provides a definition though:- Unique Visitors represents the number of unduplicated (counted only once) visitors to your website over the course of a specified time period. A Unique Visitor is determined using cookies. The Absolute Unique Visitor report counts visitors to your website (counting each visitor only once in the selected date range).

Why do I think that they haved added up the unique browser for each day?  Two reasons :-

The number they quote is just unrealistic. If you start with the Australian population and remove all the kids and all the elderly then 4.8 million would have to represent close to 40 or 50%. Ask the next 10 people you speak with outside of real estate and see what percentage has used realestate.com.au in the past month. This article covers the same argument but looking at the leading newspaper sites. http://www.crikey.com.au/2008/05/26/are-nielsen-net-ratings-bunkum/

This has been discussed several times before and I have asked for more stats from realestate.com.au before on this blog and we are never provided with anything more than these huge numbers churned out by the PR Dept.

HOWEVER!!!

How the stat is calculated is actually not the main point I was trying to raise and is essentially irrelevant. Realestate.com.au uses the word property seekers which gives a misleading impression that 4.8 million real people visited the site.  No matter what the answer turns out to be it will never represent 4.8 million people.

Why do the do that?.. The excuse offered was because the stats were “dumbed down” for agents. Despite the terminology used I dont have a problem with dumbing down of statistics as long as the essence remains the same same.

Just so its crystal clear Realestate.com.au is number one by a clear margin. I do not dispute that and I dont think anybody would. They simply do a far better job than anybody else right now, but that does not mean I have to accept the job they do nor any statistics that they quote.

The relative relationship between the traffic of the top portals is probably represented pretty accuratly by the Neilsens figures. No dispute here at all. But whether you dumb down the data or not suggesting 4.8 million people viewed the site over the period of a month is misleading. They should quote their stats and not make them out as something they are not.

The method the data is collected has severe accuracy limitations. Those limitations would apply across all portals of so a common error factor would mean that the relationship still remains the same. ie. realestate.com.au is kicking butt in most markets.

Why are the figures not accurate? In 2005 Jupiter Research found that 34 percent of “newbies” said that they’ve deleted cookies themselves, with that number reaching as high as 60 percent for experienced users. How does Neilsens track people.. through cookies!

How this relates specifically to Neilsen NetRatings statistics is discussed in more depth here

http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2005/04/the_emperor_has_1.php

In short.. the Jupiter report found that “17 percent of consumers delete cookies weekly, 12 percent monthly, and 10 percent daily — behavior that “cripples sites’ ability to track users and make critical marketing measurements.”

Whats interesting is that Neilsen’s own report on the issue found a cookie deletion rate that ranged between 7% to 50% with the average visitor to Google deleting at a rate of 25%.   It’s even worse than that as the cookies that are targetted the most for deletion by antispyware and antivirus solution are specifically tracking cookies… exactly the type Neilsens use.

So the company that realestate.com.au dumbs down stats from to create a “property seekers” number admits that it is up to 50% of its visitors could be counted more than once, and an external company believes the rate could be as higher as 60% for some user groups and that in a worse case scenario a person could be counted every single day (10% that delete daily) and antispam and antivirus software is even in more wirespread use today than it was back then.

The stats can be used to compare against other companies in the same report.. but you cannot convert them into “Property Seekers” because it sounds good from a marketing perspective. It just does not work that way!

20 Comments »

There’s been a lot of speculation about why REA & Domain haven’t uploaded listings onto Google Maps real estate search as yet & I believe the main reason why is Money.

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?

44 Comments »

Interview with Google Business Development ‘Real Estate” Justin McCarthy.

“We prefer to look at this data as through organic search, we don’t think it should be paid content, we understand that traditionally classifieds are normally paid content, but we think this data is valuable for consumers” Read the rest of this article »

23 Comments »