Spokesman for AAMI Reuben Aitchison told ABC news that it is not worth keeping the branches open because such a small number of people use them.

“There’s been significant growth in the internet channel,” he is quoted as saying. “The amount of business and transactions that is now going through our branches has dwindled to the point that it now represents less than 2 per cent of our revenue.”

Reading between the lines just on this above quote – it is clear that most people do not go to AAMI branches to join the company – however this does not tell us the full story, how many people go into the branches for customer service? Far more than 2% I would guess.

This could be a fatal mistake from AAMI and its parent company Suncorp. I would hazard to guess that retirees are the bain of their existence and suck up most of their customer service time in branches across the country. Young people however, historically are immune to customer service and expect to be treated this way.

Customer Service

Customer Service is now seen by many large companies as a pain in the derriere. Ever tried contacting Google, Yahoo or the Microsoft web services team? The truth is customer service is a thing of the past. Most web companies today cannot afford to service clients who want direct conversations and you will find that as years go by – those wanting to talk to a customer service representative will pay a premium.

Google as an example have always handled enquiries online and you would be hard pressed to speak to a customer service representative unless of course you spend a great deal of money on Google Adwords. The success of Google comes from their software being relatively easy to use and backed up by community support and pretty extraordinary online resources.

If you ever contact Google with an enquiry it will simply redirect you to a help file and in many cases will not even respond directly to an inquiry. It is up to you to learn or be left behind.

These companies also affect small web development firms such as ourselves as we have found a large spike in phone enquiries on how to use 3rd party software like Google’s web services.

Annoying trends

Realestate.com.au has always annoyed me because they charge clients a fee to feed from companies like Agentpoint, HubOnline (now owned by REA), Portplus and other feed providers – when we basically take over their customer service and save them time and money. You can only do this when you are a monopoly or a duopoly. Competition not only breeds better quality software but also great customer service!

Recently, we as a small company have found that less than 5% of our customers take up to 90% of our customer contact resources with many enquiries are relating to services and software we do not own and should not have to support. We like others will no doubt in the future separate our customer service to web, email and make these users pay a premium over others.

Another annoying trend which has come into existence is having to purchase warranties for the so called quality products we buy. In the past companies backed up their products with great warranties trying to prove to you that they are better than their competitors because of the quality of those products. You only need to go to the likes of Harvey Norman to see this play out. I always make it a point to let the service representative know that this is not the way to do business, although I think Harvey Norman and the like make a killing on these ‘value’ added fees. About the only industry that now still thumps their chest about multi year warranties are car companies and this is because competition is fierce and customer expectations through past experiences are high.

In short we are all to blame because we collectively have created monsters that are shareholder graded only on revenues and profits and rarely customer service. This again is why I (and you should too) will always support quality real estate portals that compete with the likes of REA and Domain.

Currently our company (and most others like Portplus) support our customers by feeding to a multitude of portals – even though each one costs us time and money to continue to support.

What you can do?

In short, nothing much, more and more companies will direct you to online support and help and you will need to learn how to use software or services from these companies yourself. You will find that most web companies are already web based only with support and you will need to learn the software you use.

Learn or Pay your Front Office

I have made it very clear in the past that your front office person is probably one of your most important team members and you should start to pay them accordingly. These are the people that are on the frontline, more often than not these are the people that update your website and real estate systems. The turnover of front office staff is often high and you can only look at your company to blame for this. Get someone great and add these sites (most should be relevant) to your manual for front office personal – even better still take some time to learn what these services do and how they can improve your company going forward.

• Google Webmaster Tools
• Yahoo Web Services
• Bing Web Services
• Google Analytics
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Feedburner
• WordPress

Legend has it there were once great white elephants, much sought after by the Southeast Asian monarch and European hunter. Their very existence entered the realm of folklore, and people spoke in hushed tones of lost safaris seeking fame and fortune. The white elephant symbolized great power, and its possession meant the kingdom had peace and prosperity.

Some hunters tried every technology that money could buy and gave up despondently, others searched for years in vain, still others retired in anger and frustration blaming everyone but themselves. Claims of capture proved empty, and many simply concluded that in all probability the great white elephant did not exist, and everyone should probably just shuffle off and go seek something else.

And so it came to pass that the term ’white elephant’ symbolized something valuable whose usefulness was far outweighed by its cost.

In terms of quantity and depth, the real estate industry in Australia seems pretty well served with various web-based Client Relationship Management (CRM) products. In brief, a CRM should allow you to track contact with your current and prospective clients, and is really the goose that lays the golden egg (every day… if used correctly, which is ‘patiently and persistently’).

MyDesktop      Port Plus      HubOnline      Complete Data   Console      MultiArray    Box and Dice     

… and many more (I’m not trying to get an exhaustive list in here)

As my former maths teacher used to say when he handed back our papers, ”these are mostly ‘much of a muchness’ ladies and gentlemen”. No doubt certain providers claim that theirs does more for less, is more intuitive, innovative, easy to use or secure. I am sure they are right in their own way. Most of these providers have been around for over ten years specializing in what they do and have worked really hard (usually without recognition or thanks) to bring these products to market, continually improving them and investing huge sums to get them right.

So I’ve been surprised to witness very few agents actually using these products as a CRM. While most offices claim to have purchased these (or a variant) in the past, fewer than ten percent of real estate agents I meet in the field or at training courses seem to be actively deploying a CRM product to help them keep in touch with their clients, send out regular enewsletters, match clients to properties and the like. Of the 30 per cent or so agency offices that seem to have a product right now, most are using it to merely host their web site and upload to various portals.

Why is this?

Is it a failure of education and support? Are reps suspicious of entering their clients into a system accessible across their office(s)? Are they too lazy to try new ideas? Scared of technology? Are there (their) needs not currently being filled? Or have the CRMs become too complex as they try to satisfy everyone (and end up putting a lot of people off)? Is it all just too hard?

In this policy, REA state that their “business model focuses upon licensed real estate agents as our primary customers”. It also states the “entity does not obtain at least the range of agent services set out above, REA will consider that such a listing is a “private listing”” and that “REA has made the decision not to allow private listings on its website”

However this is where the Hypocrisy starts as one hand forgot to tell the other what it was doing. REA forgot to tell Hubonline just what the rules are and even though REA owns and operates both realestate.com.au and hubonline they are working against each other.

Hubonline created the website for www.myhomeisforsale.com.au which in turn uploads and continues to upload their listings to realestate.com.au but these listings are in clear breach of realestate.com.au’s “Private Selling Policy”.

From the website of www.myhomeisforsale.com.au – “My Home Is For Sale is a professional property advocacy company which holds a real estate license.  We work with you to sell your home, providing you with the tools to sell your home without paying agents fees.”

When you see realestate.com.au’s sister company is guilty of flouting the rules, you can understand why nobody else in the past seemed to have been forced to follow the rules and stop uploading private sales.

So what does all this mean..?? First of all, let be clear… you can’t blame websites like www.myhomeisforsale.com.au and the others. They are just trying to make a buck and if REA does not enforce its own rules you can understand why they continue to upload private sellers to the system. In fact given that it was hubonline that built their website you could argue that it was given some sort of implied approval at least. In fact, if that website turns out to be pointless for their business model I reckon they should be able to ask for their money back as Hubonline should have known the concept breached REA’s rules.

A few of the comments in the other posts have focussed on the ACCC getting involved with this whole issue based on anti-competitive grounds. Till now I personally thought that was stretching it but when an REA business builds a website that is outside of the rules of another REA business, then there may be an anti-competitive case to answer after all.

One things is for sure….  Websites like www.happeningrealestate.com.au and www.place2live.com.au which I mentioned in the first article have had to change their offerings substantially. There products they offer are vastly different that those they promoted in April. They are now marketing themselves only as discount real estate agents and are not offering a service for private sellers. From this I can only conclude that realestate.com.au is now actively enforcing the rules right around the country but to be open and fair they need to have their own people follow the same rules or else someone might argue that it is anti-competitive!

Naturally this issue polarises opinions especially when you have some serious money involved. Real estate agents watched their impact on realestate.com.au being diluted with more and more private sellers popping up every day. REA had $1,000  per month per client on the line. Just  www.myhomeisforsale.com.au had over 200 clients being charged $295 up front and then $79 per month so private sellers represented a fantastic income stream for those online agents. No wonder the FSBO sites were so upset!

REA made its bed with an agent only, no private sales policy and in the end they had to lie in it because agents helped to create realestate.com.au where it is today. The moral and right thing to do was to start properly enforcing their own rules again, which to their credit they did.. after a push, a shove and a nudge.

I suspect that this issue highlighted has fallen through the cracks and will be rectified shortly,  as they seem to have fixed the problem with the other companies. Whilst they may not have cleaned up every incidence just yet it is probably well on the way.

The issue of private sellers on realestate.com.au will probably raise its head again one day. As an agent my preference is that private sellers be kept off the portal.. but IF it was ever to change, I really dont think it will make that much of a difference. Some.. but not much. I know many agents will consider that as blasphemy but lets look at it another way… Google’s entry (Where the bloody hell are you?) could mean that they become a major player in presenting listings to prospective purchasers and anybody can upload to Google Base.

This all got me thinking about what everyone’s preferences would be over the matter…How many would agents would accept private sellers if www.realestate.com.au decided to allow them? Would love to hear your thoughts!

Feel free to forward this around via email/twitter/facebook etc and ask real estate agents and salespeople to complete the poll.

EDIT: It seems that the deadline for the updated Private Selling Policy is still to come which goes a long way to explain why www.myhomeisforsale.com has not been updated. I think we can expect to see policy enforcement very shortly … Glenn  26/7/09

Yes, companies pay a fortune to have Nielsen NetRatings code inserted and for them to tell the advertising world just how amazing their visitor numbers are (last count REA had nearly 5 million unique visitors to their site – which I will seriously question once REA get past 22 million).

However for the average Joe, Google Analytics is all they ever need to seriously measure their websites performance. If you can be bothered (and you should be) you can find out so much about the success or otherwise of your business by logging into your Google Analytics account or by setting your Analytics to send you a weekly report. [Yes, of course you must be registered and yes of course you must have the code set.]

Now Google has set their systems FREE and we are in for a world of fun. You can now get data directly from your Google and mash it together for your own purposes. This is what is great about API’s, you set the data free and you will be amazed at what is developed.

I am sure all of the property feed providers such HubOnline, MyDesktop and Portplus will integrate this data into their own systems in the near future. Already at launch Google has a number of examples. Here is an excerp from their blog article.

For example, how would you like to access Google Analytics from your phone? Now you can, with this Android application from Actual Metrics. How about accessing Analytics from your desktop? It’s here from Desktop-Reporting.

And if you’re interested in seeing how integrating Google Analytics can enhance your own business take a look at these examples. MailChimp has integrated Google Analytics into their email marketing platform and ShufflePoint® provides a service for adding Google Analytics data into PowerPoint® presentations. See how youcalc has created apps that allow you to mashup Google Analytics, AdWords, Salesforce.com and other enterprise data.

Check out more customer examples on our developer site. These apps demonstrate only some of the creative possibilities and we know you’ll discover other interesting ways to use the Analytics API.

I have long been scornful of Nielson and other ratings agencies because they only include less than 0.5% of the websites in their metrics. If Google really wanted to – they could release a FREE version of all of the website data across many industries and pretty much make this 1990′s business model redundant overnight.

In the meantime, have some fun with your data, play around and let us know some ideas that you think could be built with this data.

HubOnline launched their revamped system aiming to clean up the interface to make it easier for their clients to manage their online listings and contact management system (CRM).

HubOnline is a wholly owned subsidiary of realestate.com.au and therefore have the unenviable task of trying to combine all of their offerings into one system. For the most part this new overhaul makes for a cleaner interface, although under the hood it looks pretty much the same as the old system. ( I may be wrong)

That being said, there have been some nice additions, particularly in the reporting and navigation. Help and Support seems to have been better placed throughout the site. Overall the new system looks feels alot better, and hopefully for HubOnline this will lead to a growth in the use of their systems as they face stiff competition from MyDesktop, Portplus and other systems.

The biggest problem HubOnline will have in the future is convincing REA to reinvest in this company as they have apparently cut back on staff in the past months at a time when they were starting to publish some nice work.

You can download the full release here [PDF File 870 kb]

Rather than make business2 readers wait until this seeps out publicly, I’m going to give you a heads up on two things that are happening at realestate.com.au today.

I’m sorry that I probably won’t be able to participate in the comment stream today. But, I didn’t want that to keep me from telling you about this.

In the first change, the company’s Agent Solutions Group (which provides the HubOnline Software) is making some changes that will be of interest to anyone using HubOnline.  Here’s the email they sent to HubOnline 1 customers today:

Over the past three months, REA have had a number of projects to investigate and understand what HubOnline customers (as well as customers of competing real estate Customer Relationship Management packages) need, use and value in their solutions.

As a result, we are announcing a roadmap for making some important and meaningful improvements to the version of HubOnline that you are currently using.

We intend to release improvements to HubOnline over the coming half-year. These will include:

• Simplifying the application to improve the user experience and reduce training requirement
• Improved performance speed of the CRM application
• Improved speed for vendors and buyers viewing your website
• Improved system stability and availability
• Improved disaster recovery and protection of your data

Some of you know that we have had an R&D project underway that would have eventually resulted in a newer version of HubOnline on a different platform.  Based on the user research we have done, we have determined that this is simply not the best way forward for the majority of our customers who want a simpler CRM solution, rather than a more complex one with advanced features.  The research tells us that most agents want easy-to-use and reliable software that provides an agent website, export to multiple portals and services, good (but basic) contact management and reporting.  Therefore, our intention is to focus on making these improvements to the current product.

We believe that this will get you more improvement in a shorter time-frame, and will ultimately meet your needs better, than the more complex solution we were building.  Again, this is not just our opinion, but is based on the feedback we have received from our customers and the customers of other Australian real estate CRM applications.

What do you need to do? Nothing.  Because HubOnline is offered as a “Software As a Service” over the internet, you will receive the benefits of these improvements as they become available.  We will communicate improvements beforehand, and as is our normal practice, will design and release them to minimise disruption.

Thank you for being our customer, and we hope that you will see these improvements as a net benefit to your business.

The HubOnline team made another announcement, too. Here are some excerpts from the letter mailed yesterday to customers of the Trust Accounting product lines–including Clarke Computers SalesTrust and RentTrust.

REA has agreed to sell its Trust Accounting product line to Rockend Technology Pty Ltd (Rockend). This means that from December 12th, 2008, your contract for the Clark Computers products will be assigned to Rockend. Rockend will also provide future services and customer support. You can reach Rockend on 1 300 657 700.

We have selected Rockend to take over your customer relationship in respect of trust accounting services because of its experience in trust accounting. Rockend has been recognized by the Customer Service Institute of Australia (CSIA) with both state and national awards for its excellence in supporting customers.

We believe that this change is in the best interest of our Trust Accounting customers as Rockend has proven its commitment to the excellent customer service and support.

Rockend have informed us that it is their intention to continue supporting these products for the foreseeable future, and over time to help customers make an easy transition to the core Rockend products. You do not need to take any action for this change to occur and there should not be any disruption to your support services, although the team will be physically moving to the Rockend office on December 12, so responses may be delayed on that day.

I would like to thank you for being a trust accounting customer of the REA Group. We look forward to continuing to provide you with our range of other services.

Mo raised that fact that Hubonline, owned by REA, was built on SugarCRM.

Eddie Cetin, the National Business Development Manager for HubOnline contacted me and confirmed that their new version (v2) that had just been completed was built on SugarCRM. I had a demo of the old version of Hubonline last year so Eddie invited me to preview the new version when he flew to the Gold Coast next.

For the sake of background and disclosure we have been using the old Multiarray Sales System for 8 or 9 years with a fairly advanced set of activity trails integrated into the program that features several hundred letters, surveys, scheduled phone calls, personal follow-ups and other individual activities over 40 pre-programmed activity trails.

Our market research back then showed Multiarray was the only company who had a serious CRM ability. That program is now quite dated but on a feature for feature basis it is interesting how well it stands up today. Stuff that we were doing around 10 years ago HubOnline still cannot do today, but more on that later.

I was involved with the Beta Testing of the new Multiarray version which was released last year although as yet we have not installed the latest version. The initial rollout was only an internet based solution… (please note that there is huge differences between a web and an internet based solutions) and they have only just released the inhouse server version. Despite my involvement with the beta testing we still undertook market research recently to consider out options. After that we decided to proceed with the Multiarray version when they brought out the inhouse server option as it is more suitable for our database size and that is how we are still moving forward.

HubOnline

Firstly let me say that the new version of HubOnline is a breath of fresh air over the old one and it is indeed built on SugarCRM. The program layout, speed and general usability appears far superior to the old version and is an essential upgrade for their current users. Now I did not get to drive because of time restrictions but I certainly asked to see more of sections that I thought warranted further investigation. I asked lots of questions and offered my opinion here and there.

The Good

SugarCRM provides them with an excellent framework to work upon. The technologies used are the very latest and you can see that straight way. The system appears very stable which is the SugarCRM pedigree at work and usability seems much improved. The ability to roll out new features on such a system should be a real advantage to the HubOnline team.

Unlike other solutions, they don’t have to program it from the ground up. A lot of the grunt work has been done and is world class. They just have to worry about adding the Real Estate flavour to it all.

The Bad

This really is just a prettied up version of the old HubOnline. As far as features go this is fancy new dress, but the same old girl as before although she is apparently booked in for a significant makeover.

The feature list is not really improved from the previous version but to be fair, Eddie advised that this was conscious decision for the first release was only to mirror the features of their original version. This should make upgrading their current user base as painless as possible. Current users have to concentrate only on the new interface, rather than learning a host of new features at the same time. I am sure they plan to implement new features in the very near future.

Despite being built on top of a world class CRM, because the feature list has not been improved upon it is still a case with usability of a real estate admin package with a CRM bolted on.

The best way I can explain this is to give you real world examples that we have been using with out current system for nearly a decade. I covered each of these examples (and others) with Eddie Cetin and explained why each was important. Since Hubonline was still working with the old feature list I did not bother covering any of the more advanced CRM features in the current version of Multiarray.

With Hubonline whenever you change the status or contact type you have to “remember” to activate the right activity trail. That to me appears archaic and prone to far too much human error forgetting to add the activity trail. I believe that if you upgrade an appraisal to a listing in the system for example, the CRM should be smart enough to automatically know to ask you if you want to stop all the prior “appraisal activities” that are now no longer valid and automatically offer for you to select from a list of relevant listing activity trails.

The old version (and certainly the new version) of Multiarray integrates the CRM changes into the administration changes. Whether it be expiring a listing, marking a property under contract or the dozens of other changes, it automatically provides you with the relevant selection leaving nothing to memory.

Running any CRM software in a real estate office will obviously result in substantial mail being generated by the system every day. Things like thank you letters, performance surveys, anniversary letters etc etc etc. Some days we can have in excess of 100 letters generated by the system and even on a slow day we will still have 20 or more.

With Hubonline daily mail merging is still a fully manual operation and each letter has to be merged one at time. Depending upon your setup these can be done by each individual salesperson or collectively by an admin staff member. The productivity wasted to do this over the course of a year would be huge and if left to each salesperson how many would really make it the mail. Far from all I would suggest.

For nearly 10 years in our office the day’s pre-programmed letters are printed at the press of one button. With that one press all the letters are printed and the contacts history is updated.

These are just two features relating to the CRM integration with the admin side of the system that HubOnline struggles with. Thankfully the SugarCRM connection means integrating these and other more advanced features should be fairly simple.

Hubonline has dashlets in the system which allows you to add and arrange information panels into the program. This works similiar to iGoogle. The concept is good but the dashlets have some layout issues that need to be looked at because the amount of vertical scrolling is obscene. The current size of the dashlets is very inefficient and so much space is wasted with having to scroll down being the only solution..

The dashlets problem is also made worse because the program is really for high resolution displays. The dashlets or the program dont dynamically resize based on the screen size and we were using a 1024×768 resolution on a laptop and there was horizontal scrolling as well as vertical scrolling which is going to annoy a lot of people.

If you check out the screenshot from RealFutureCRM you can see how much information you can squeeze into just one page. For Hubonline to display all this information would require a lot of vertical scrolling.

The Ugly

Web based solutions are great for flexibility because anybody with a browser can access the information from anywhere in the world. This however brings about problem that few consider till it happens to them. Security!

Password security is better than no security at all, but as a true measure to protect an asset as valuable as a mature database is very very dangerous.

Just one scenario for you to consider. As an agency principal you have a salesperson that has been with you for a few years up and leave and setup his own agency down the road. If you operate a web based system for your office anybody can access that information, as long as they know a correct username and password. As soon as you know he is leaving you shut out his account but because he has been with you for several years he knows one of your admin staff just uses her three kids names as her password, alternating them every few weeks whenever she is forced to updated it. Another staff member uses the same word but just changes the last number every time. It might be Sydney1, Sydney2, Sydney3 etc etc etc. This and similar stories happen in just about every office, real estate or not, right around the country and the world.

Without any advanced computer knowledge or hacking skills that salesperson turned competitor now has fulltime access to your database. He knows every single appraisal you do, every sale you have made, every single listing you make and every single buyer you have. How much would that cost if it happened to you?

Web based CRM solutions like HubOnline have to start taking security of the database seriously. There is a number of methods they can use to protect the data such as locking down some accounts to unique IP addresses. Most admin accounts will only ever need to be accessed from within the office so locking those accounts to a static IP will assist with protection. Locking salespeople’s accounts down to a specific IP range used by your ISP will also help. So will enhanced password security forcing upper and lowercase letters and numbers in each password. Refusing passwords too similar as past passwords.

Logging all accesses by each account and displaying the last login to the user every time will raise suspicions if somebody else is using your account. Forcing an office wide password change every time a staff member is marked as inactive will also help.

Overview

I was genuinely impressed with the new version of HubOnline. I think the move to SugarCRM was a positive one that will certainly pay dividends. Advanced real estate CRM.. Certainly not. Not yet anyway. But they are positioned to have an excellent solution within a revision or two.

Right now and strictly as far as the CRM aspects are concerned I could only recommend it for their existing users and those that do not want to operate an advanced CRM solution. The existing Hubonline users can have their staff get use to the new interface before new features are implemented.

As a direct comparison Multiarray’s solution offers right now a far better CRM experience however it has to be pointed out that there is a fairly large difference between the two in price. In fact, their previous version has been offering for years many things that HubOnline are still to implement.

It’s important to understand that such a comment has to be viewed in perspective though as there is much more to a real estate solutions than the CRM with both software offering different feature sets and each solution needs to be looked at as a whole and I certainly did not get time to see those aspects of HubOnline.

Security needs to be improved and I believe that if they can they harness the real CRM ability of SugarCRM and integrate it into the administration tasks plus fix a few of their layout issues they will have one of the best solutions in Australia.

It will be interesting to see if they build on it over the next couple of updates and take advantage of what they have got.

I have received an email from Eddie Cetin since the demo replying to a number of questions that I had sent him. In that email he advised that they are currently looking at the security issues I raised and are implementing the automatic daily mail merge. The automatic prompting of activity trails and more minor issues not raised here are not yet under consideration for implementation.