Most real estate agencies are not that proactive when it comes to the Internet. One of the advantages of belonging to any real estate group is that members can leverage the knowledge, experience, buying power and strategies put in place by Head Office with minimal effort.

Just about every head office operates a group website as well as templates for the individual offices. There are a few groups that take the lead on the internet for their members a lot further.  They invest heavily in dollars and human resources in SEO, and other traffic generation solutions.

Now most of the time the groups keep their strategies fairly clean and above board. Well that’s what I thought until I came across a Harcourts head office initiative that I believe crosses the line by a fair margin. In fact I decided to bounce the issue off a couple of people whose opinions I respect when it comes to emarketing in the real estate industry.  Both are creative and fairly open minded but both used the same word more than once….. DODGY!  and I reckon that sums it up nicely.

Many individual real estate agencies, real estate groups and even some portals upload their property to Google who then in turn integrate those listings into Google Maps.  Google also make their data available for anybody who wants it through an api interface.  This api allows sites like Base Estate to operate as they instantly have thousands of current property for sale through one single feed.

So somebody at Harcourts decided to tap into the Google Base API and integrate it into individual Harcourts offices. So you may be wondering why listings from other real estate groups like Ray White, First National, Professionals and a bunch of independents are on Harcourts offices.  The way the properties are displayed it is meant to appear that all the listings belong to that Harcourts office.

All of the information that identifies the salesperson and agency that has the authority to sell the property is removed as is the link back to the agents websites.  What is happening is they are claiming everyone elses hard work as their own. If you are not a Harcourts real estate agency yourself chances are your listings can be found on most individual Harcourt’s websites right now and the contact form on the page goes to a Harcourts salesperson.

I wonder how all those Harcourts offices are going to handle the question when the Fair Trading inspectors ask to sight their listing authority on each property they are promoting for sale on their website. .

So why would they do this?
It’s not for SEO purposes because the way they implemented it there is no real seo benefits at all.  It therefore can only be what I like to call “small man syndrome”  where somebody small wants to appear to be much bigger than what they are.  Harcourts agencies using this “dirty trick” are being promoted as being much larger and more successful than they really are.  A small agency with just 10 listing for sale and struggling with market share can appear to have hundreds of listings in the surrounding suburbs.

Just this small area below shows listings held by the local Ray White, LJ Hooker, First National and an independent agency on the Harcourts Southport website.

To check this out go to any Harcourts individual agency website, try one completely out of your area,  and enter your home suburb in the box indicated here

and you should see just about every listing available in your area shown on the map even if the office is located in a different state. I have used the Harcourts Southport office in the above example but most of their offices have their own site just like this.

So how do they get away with it?

I don’t believe they can as I am sure they have breached the Google API terms and conditions by removing the listing agents details and “passing off” themselves as the lister. And I believe by implying that they are the lister brings about its own legal issues. They also have not got an api key for each domain instead they have framed in the maps to each agent website which are hosted on the single domain helpsellmyproperty.net which is owned by Harcourts International in New Zealand.

The comments in the code is interesting and shows clearly their intention:

Now I am sure they will offer the lame excuse that this search box states “All Properties For Sale” and there is another small link on the page that states “Our Property”  but IMHO that is just not going to work.  The listing agent has been removed from display as has been the link back to the original agency and the whole thing is the first search box on each home page.

Another thing to keep in mind is that they also have recent sales option in the menu which shows the sales of others offices.  I think the average person in the street would be totally fooled by this. into thinking a small agency is really a super agency.

There are quite a few agencies doing it tough at the moment and I would not blame anybody getting upset over losing a listing to a Harcourts sales agent because of this deception. In fact take it a step further and you have to wonder just how many sales have been conducted on conjunctional arrangements because the Harcourts agency claimed to represent the property to the buyer on their website.

If this practice impresses you as much as it does me then make sure you let them know below!

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)

At 3.00pm today Google launched their new real estate search mapping tool which allows real estate agents to publish their listings for free and the public to browse listings.

The site has a number of new features. Users of the site can search for listings in a particular suburb and then refine the listings down using the various option, the map reloads and only the listings appear with your search (as little icons on the map). Users can then review property information via map pop ups and then go directly to the agents listing from there.

Currently there are a number of listings driven from Homehound, Harcourts and other groups, however Domain and Realestate.com.au have yet to send their listings through the free service from Google.

You can send feeds via the API or from a variety of Feed types and research this by clicking here. Talk to your feed provider about getting your listings on Google, its free and it should bring your business some pretty good leads as Google Maps has some pretty good research tools already built in.

Business2.com.au will write a review in next few days. Below is the press release from Google Australia.

Google today announced the addition of a real estate search feature to Google Maps in Australia. The new feature allows real estate agents, franchise groups and portals alike to upload their listings directly to Google Maps at no cost, making them more easily discoverable by the millions of Google Maps users in Australia.

Increasingly, people are starting their search for a new home online – Nielsen research shows that 87% of Australian home buyers use the internet to research properties*. Google saw more than 35% growth in real estate-related searches from Jan/Feb 2008 to Jan/Feb 2009**.

“We know that many Australian home buyers already use Google Maps to help their house-buying and renting decisions, especially driving directions and Street View, and by making real estate listings available right in Google Maps we can drive qualified buyers directly to listings,” says Andrew Foster, product manager, Google.

“It’s a simple and free way for real estate companies to make their listings even more discoverable, and have them seen on an easy-to-navigate map.”

Real estate agents can visit http://maps.google.com.au/realestate to find out more information about how to work with Google to have their listings appear on Google Maps.

The new feature lets potential home buyers enter a city or suburb and see available listings represented by markers or small circles on the map. They can then refine their search by price, type of property, bedrooms, bathrooms, and parking. The map will automatically update with relevant listings when panned or zoomed to another suburb, and when the search criteria is changed. Clicking on a marker or a small circle will provide more information about the listing, as well as the contact details of the listing agent and a link to their website.

President of the Real Estate Institute of Western Australia, Rob Druitt, said agents and property managers in WA would welcome the opportunity to have their listings searchable on Google Maps.

“The real estate profession, perhaps more than many others, has become strongly focused around IT and the use of websites over the last decade. The evolution of the internet has transformed the sector, such that buyers, sellers and renters are much better informed and have easy and quick access to images and contacts. Indeed, this is now the high expectation with property consumers.

“Agents are keen to embrace this, as they are always looking for new and different ways to increase exposure of their listings without runaway expenditure. The opportunity presented by Google can only help in this regard,” Mr Druitt said.

The original Google Maps prototype was invented by four engineers in Sydney: Lars Rasmussen, Jens Rasmussen, Noel Gordon and Stephen Ma, all of whom still work in Google’s Sydney engineering centre. All over the country, Australians use Google Maps to find addresses and local businesses, see satellite imagery, obtain driving directions, and create and share personalised maps, making it the most popular online maps site in Australia according to Nielsen NetRatings (May 2009).

Note: Google Australia will answer all reasonably related questions if you clearly include them in comments below.