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A common theme within the real estate industry is when an agent speaks with a vendor who just completed a new home where they always say “we would do many things different with our next home” – the same too applies with agent websites.

Agents struggle to upgrade their own websites yet they boast the latest mobile phone technologies. Telephones are not the solution for generating market activity enquiries. Unless your online media platform is switched on and intelligently activated those telephone enquiries will diminish. In this new century agents/agencies are judged on what their respective online platform delivers where more importantly this involves the businesses driving the communication not vice versa. How many names, telephone numbers, email addresses do you presently have in “your” electronic database?

“You can run – but you can’t hide.” Don’t hide rather start seeking, delivering and then exceeding your online expectations. Move your business to the future given online technologies with aligned marketing strategies are moving at such a frenetic pace that even the most savvy of online real estate businesses are struggling to keep – up. The savvy real estate businesses are the first point of contact for new listings to prospective purchasers which are delivered via an email alert – your personal viewing invitation. Invite the call and invoke – The Law of Reciprocity.

We launched our online media platform back on September 15, 2000. Call it what you want just that at the end of the day we were actually chasing something that was yet to be recognised nor properly discovered for that matter. Five years later, Google entered the online world and the rest is history where today, it’s all about climbing that Google search engine optimisation (SEO) ladder. For all your individual demographic markets one has to explore so that you can then fast track your online SEO position. Just like market positions which are all about growing (not declining) so in which direction is your online strategy headed – better still, do you actually have one?

In life, we are all consumers where not a single day goes by that we don’t buy product(s). When you are buying something you are drawn to product presentation. Change hats – as a real estate agent ask yourself how you are presenting and communicating your properties on your real estate media platform. Are you tracking your online traffic on a daily and weekly basis – your property website as compared to the paid portals? Don’t rely on external forces rather concentrate on your internal deliveries to consumers. When you get the mix right your website must be the (primary) source and the property portals (back – up) secondary for your online communications. Drive your business not others that you invest with. Your online message to consumers has to be your number one priority.
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Online guarantees a market – print suggests a circulation market. Just because you buy a newspaper does not suggest that you want to buy a property – the smartest online real estate agencies work from within not without. I take Unique Browsers (UB’s) well over circulation figures any day – given that UB’s are consumer activated who specifically go to your website in search of information. When consumers are not chasing your website then something is alarmingly amiss?

With Stage 2 – I want to focus on the four key ingredients that I believe assure you of the perfect building process for your online media platform. Much like building a home these four points are what I consider the “bricks and mortar”. You need to build on your foundations first.

• 1. Technology
• 2. Database
• 3. Communication
• 4. Future

All four are actually intertwined although the key processes are the identification, application and integration is to ensure that you are applying best practice for your real estate media platform. When the right technology is applied you can effectively contact your database and communicate your business activity online to your key demographic markets.

TECHNOLOGY

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One word keeps resonating – WordPress which launched to the public on November 2005 a state – of – the – art publishing platform that is free. When I look at the leading websites globally they are all using WordPress. We have been running WordPress for just over twelve months now – and I am one of their greatest fans – the perfect online publisher. WordPress also, provides a fantastic database function that administers our daily database email alerts and also, the flight centre for our subscriber weekly newsletter.

In conjunction with WordPress we run Agentpoint which manages our website individual property presentations for all our listings (the back-end). The dashboard (control centre) required absolutely no training for our staff – a vital ingredient for business owners that struggle to understand online. The transition period to a smart online business must apply the Kiss Theory: Keep it Simple Stupid. If you understand it – you use it. If you don’t understand it you don’t use it!

DATABASE

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The Achilles heel for most real estate businesses – agents own vendors not buyers. If a business is running multiple databases it is terminally ill, where in all probability no one is singing from the one hymn book. Your business is simply a one agency platform that is collectively united or a divorced communication process. United we stand – divided your business will fall. The leading real estate online businesses are running the one (and only) database platform.

COMMUNICATION

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Remember the Telstra advertisement “Why didn’t you call?” Verbal communication is important – email alerts supersede memory loss provided you are managing your database correctly. Database entry = communication. For the cost of a postage stamp (not including an envelope) you can send out thousands of email alerts. Calibrate your business so that you can communicate with your online subscribers. Activate don’t detonate your online communication platform.

FUTURE

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When was the last time you used the White Pages (print edition) to look up a telephone number? Consumers use search engines for over ninety per cent (and growing daily) of their respective enquiries. We still use print with online where the global financial crisis offered an amazing Litmus Test – that being significant declines in vendor paid advertising (VPA). As a consequence we moved our business to online – (refer points 1, 2 and 3) and outperformed all of our competitors ($63,000,000 – June 2009 month sales.)

Which takes me to point 4 – you can’t expect to remain relevant unless you embrace, adapt and activate your real estate media platform.

Online is a magnificent tool – just you have to work on it. We all know what happens when the tools (of trade) go down – your competitors build something bigger and better. Otherwise known (as work in progress) where online today, is very progressive, aggressive and obsessive. Just look at what Google did to Microsoft (whom had many years start on them).

Sit back – take three breathes, and design your perfect online strategy for 2010 and beyond.

All I ask is that where is your online business today – not tomorrow? Today, it happens and tomorrow it follows. (Hmm, I should claim that quote.)

Search engines are the  key to generating significant traffic on the internet. It can certainly be supplemented and enhanced by social networking like Facebook, Blogs and the Twitter but search engines are King. In other places around the world a number of search engines are very popular but in Australia, there is only one serious contender for the crown and thats Google.

Even well known brands in our industry like realestate.com.au have over 30% of their traffic delivered every single day by Google. Many of the returning vistors would be returning visitors have already arrived from the search engines in the past.

What this Article Series is.. and what it isnt

This article is going to be one in a series covering the topic of Search Engine Optimisation or SEO for short as it applies to the Australian Real Estate Industry. Search Engine Optimisation is the process of getting your site ranked higher in the search engines and thus generating more traffic.

This article is going to cover the basics of Search Engine Optimisation and how to get more visitors to your website. We are not going to be covering any advanced topics and everything discussed should be able to be completed by the average Australian Real Estate Agent with minimal technical skill. Each step is fairly easy but if you need help just ask for help in the comments section.

The restrictions of some content management systems will mean a few of you may not be able to do specific things but if thats the case, just skip that section and move on. You will probably have have to pay for some things to be done on your website but it should be very minimal as most things you will be able to do yourself.

Please understand that I am not going to provide a step be step guide of every single mouse click or form you have to fill in.  That would require something about 10 times the size. Each step is very easy to do and millions of people from a range of skill levels have already been there before you. If you dont understand anything or want some help, just ask.

What is Search Engine Optimisation?

Now before we get too heavily into the subject I must point out a few things. SEO is considered a black art because there is no rule book or documented procedures to follow. Search engines use proprietary algorithms to rank all the websites in the world and they don’t share how that algorithm works for obvious reasons. This means that SEO experts around the world analyse in every fine detail the websites that do rank at the top and they attempt to reverse engineer just what makes a site rank well.

The very basics that form the core are universally agreed by most SEO experts but other than those you will always find someone somewhere who will disagree on any specific tactic or point. Also many experts who agree on a specific SEO strategy might still disagree on the importance that specific issue means in the calculating of web ranking. The important thing to remember is that it is the overall effect of everything that will deliver you results.

What Sort of Results Can You Expect?
SEO cannot work miracles! If your agency is in some small little town about 800km west of civilisation then the worlds best SEO is not going to create more people looking to buy real estate in your area. Better SEO than your competitors will get you more share of the existing searches but it cannot create more searches out of thin air.  It also takes time for everything to work, a lot less than it use to, but it does not not happen overnight. You may first notice changes to how you rank in a few weeks after we finish but the full effect of what you do wont be felt for a few months at least.

In each article I am going to try and give you additional resources for further reading and if anybody at all has anything to add or share to the articles feel free to comment away.

I am aiming to have each article in the series require about 2 hours work and the target is for 6 articles. There is a specific logic to the order of these articles because some things either have to be done before others or they take longer to start acting.

Lets Get Started!

To measure the success of what you are going to undertake we need to record exactly where you are now. This will set a baseline that you have to work from. During this article there is going to be things you have to send your web provider. Obviously sending them each item in one email to be all done together will be the cheapest way to get this added to your site.

Website Grader Report

Website Grader produces a report on your website and gives you an overall grade out of 100. This is not perfect by any means but it is the best overall ranking of a website currently available and is perfect to compare how you score today and how you score after a few months. It takes a lot of factors into consideration when ranking a website. Request a report on your website. A good number would be between 80-100.Any score under that and you really need to do some work on your site to start getting results. Read the report it gives you as it will explain what you are doing right, and what still needs work.

Web Analytics

To understand just what is happening on your site including how many visitors you get and what pages they visit you need some sort of web analytics reporting. A visitor count or hit counters just don’t cut it anymore. If you don’t have detailed statistics on your web visitors you need to install one.

I strongly suggest Google Analytics which is totally free although you may be charged by your web provider to install it. Hubonline recently announced a special for June for nearly $600 which also includes short property urls. For my mind this is highway robbery.  In contrast I believe Portplus will install Google Analytics on your website for under $100 and I think they do short urls as standard.

If you have a Google account such as a gmail account you can use it to log into Google Analytics and create a profile for your website otherwise just create an account now. Google Analytics will provide you with some code that you need to send your web provider to get them to inject it into every page on your site. If you don’t want to use Google Analytics then see if your web provider has another detailed statistics package they can offer but dont just rely on property views.

Google Webmaster

Google Webmaster is a suite of tools for managing how your site integrates with Google Search. We will cover some of those tools in future articles but for now just setup the account and get the verification process underway.

Create an account at Google Webmaster using your Google Account login details you just used for Google Analytics. Add a profile for your website and it will ask you to verify in one of two different ways. Select the meta tag option and send that to your web provider to add to the code of your homepage.

Microsoft Bing Webmaster and Yahoo Site Explorer

The other major search providers, Microsoft and Yahoo also have their own versions of Google Webmaster. Create accounts with Microsoft Bing Webmasters and Yahoo Site Explorer and you should setup accounts with both of them and add your website profile. Select the meta tag verification option for both and send these meta tags through to your web provider.

Sitemaps

A modern website should have a sitemap which provides instructions to search engines on exactly what pages you have, when they were last updated and how important are they. To find out if you have a sitemap on your site already you need to add the word sitemap.xml to your web address in a web browser. For our agency site the web address is http://www.nfn.com.au so we enter http://www.nfn.com.au/sitemap.xml and we find that we have a sitemap on our website.

If you don’t have a sitemap don’t panic you need to contact your web provider and ask them to create a sitemap for your site and ask them to place a reference to that sitemap in your robots.txt file. Dont worry what all that means just tell them and only get concerned if their techs don’t understand it.

You will not be able to add your website’s sitemap to Google Webmaster, Microsoft Bing Webmaster and Yahoo Sitexplorer until you have verified all of your accounts. I will remind you again in the next article but don’t forget to send your web provider the verification instructions and get them to setup a Sitemap for you if you don’t already have one.

Save Your Searches

Identify the three or four suburbs that make up your core trade area and use them to search google printing out the first two pages of results each time. Add the words “real estate”, “property”, “real estate agent”, “rentals” and “property for sale” and do a search on each.

So just for the suburb of Nerang I would conduct the following searches on Google and print out the first two pages of results for each.

1. Nerang
2. Nerang real estate
3. Nerang Property
4. Nerang real estate agent
5. Nerang rentals
6. Nerang property for sale

Repeat for each of your core suburbs and identify just where your site returns for each of those results. In the future you are going to run the same searches and if everything has worked out well you will be ranking higher. Ideally you want to be coming in the top three for every search on every one of your core suburbs. Ideally you want to be number 1 for each search but top 3 will still be pretty good.

Next Article

We have now set a baseline to work from so you can see just what your work results in and started some prep work we will follow up in in future articles. The next article in the series will cover link building and getting your site listed in a range of online real estate and general business directories.

Further Reading

Read up on the Real Estate SEO Study as it shows you how important your pages look on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP’s)

Well what a year it has been, with just about every major company in the real estate and classifieds market vying for entry into this years awards.

So how do you make our dumb and dumber awards? Well quite simply, you make a schoolboy mistake, try to cover something up or worse still knowingly do something that is so obviously dumb to everyone else aside from your inner sanctum.

So here is our list for this year, enjoy!

1. WINNER – REA Group – Realestate.com.au

What do you do when one of your email servers have hundred’s of thousands’s of property email enquiries stuck and not delivered for months and months on end to real estate agents battling through tough times? Well for starters some bright spark decided we will just deliver them to agents who had no clue of the age of the emails! Once the story broke here on business2.com.au REA then went into damage control and placed a note in agent admin and then later sent out an email explaining the situation to unsuspecting agents. This left agents embarrassed – their reputations tarnished and having to apologise to ten’s of thousand’s of enquirers.

REA offered a heartfelt apology, discussed compensation, but decided to just weather the storm and continue business as usual. REA’s reputation for care has never been worse and will take a hell of a lot of work to win back agents trust. More price rises to come will not help their cause. Fluffy promotional emails will not do anything either, hard work, improved customer service and some humility will help.

2. RUNNER UP – PBL & Microsoft

Get a photo op with a bunch of Steve Jobs wannabes on launch, spend ten’s of millions of dollars marketing a website with out-of-date and sold listings, less than 30% of your rivals listings (and the same data), do buddy deals with a handful of the major franchise groups along with the worst real estate interface to come out of the 21st century and what do you get? Well you get them running scared and selling it off in 12 months for less than 3% of what they put into it. Still it has to be one of his better deals since he took over from daddy. If you want to know how NOT to build and launch a real estate portal, note the myhome.com.au debacle. The new owners are trying their best and have really got back to basics. May be worth the try now!

3. Major Telcos

Put together pathetic customers service, disgraceful data plans, slow networks and you have yourself a major Telco. Telstra may have the best wireless Internet in Australia, but it has the most expensive – restrictive plans around and Optus is not much better. It pays big time to look around. Maybe Telstra should spend some time and money on the people that make them money rather than trying to protect their monopoly. Optus does not fare much better and you only have to look into the Whirpool forums to see how many people loath their Telcos.

4. The Financial Meltdown

Oh, how we were once impressed by our finance market friends driving their Maserati’s and Porsches, how we listened to their amazing insights into how the money markets worked, how impressed we were about how they speculate and how their models make everyone rich and successful. Turns out they were all pretty much clueless, having fancy degrees on a wall means nothing if you don’t have real world smarts. If making money is your only goal then you will eventually fail, problem is – this time around everyone suffered.

It is ok to strive for an open market economy, but should mum and dads around the world have to bail them out when it all goes pear-shaped?

5. Get it ‘FREE’ Mobile Domain

SMS property alerts on your mobile, great idea and absolutely free – well free as in 0.55 cents an SMS. Ooops sorry forgot to mention that! ACCC noted this and slapped Fairfax over the knuckles.

6. REA’s Peak Industry Body

Way way back in March 2007 (nearly 2 years ago, REA setup ‘The Peak Industry Body’, this was no doubt an effort to ‘connect’ with you, ‘Joe the Plumber’, meeting ‘at least’ 6 times a year would equate to around 24 meetings so far. I think each meeting ended with a Hollowmen ‘steady as she goes approach’ because unless I am mistaken nothing has ever come out of this – except continual price rises :)

7. Internet Explorer

To every single software/website or so called IT expert that only works in Internet Explorer or in the latter case only only allows you to use IE6, hang your heads in shame. Every time I use Internet Explorer I am frustrated, whether it is testing sites in IE6 or 7 and now IE8.

The latest debacle for Internet Explorer came just a few days ago.

The vulnerability could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted Web page using Internet Explorer. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights. This security update is rated Critical for Internet Explorer 5.01, Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1, and Internet Explorer 7.

Basically anyone could access your PC and take anything they liked. Microsoft stated that it is always looking at ways to improve their product, no, they are always looking at ways to get it to at least work. One friend of mine lost $4,800 just yesterday and is scrambling to get it back because someone hacked their PC.

So free yourself from the train wreck of a browser which is Internet Explorer and jump with Firefox, Opera, Safari or Google Chrome and leave, buggy, slow, insecure software behind. If your software provider can’t cut it, then leave them behind as well.

Note: Also read some reviews on anti virus software and get it installed on all pc’s.

8. Why are we waiting?

Google needs to get its act together and release a solution that the whole market is waiting for. Every day I am asked the question and each day I have no answer. I know they are working on it – but come on guys and girls. Worldwide the advertisers market for a stand-alone real estate website from Google would be worth billions and billions of dollars of new advertising revenue.

9. Yellow Pages

Time to get a new advertising campaign, no one really cares about you any more and the campaigns warning us of impending financial gloom if we do not advertise with you just don’t cut it any more. Rising costs, hundreds of thousands of books dumped in rubbish bins or left rotting in the rain – and a business model that just plain sucks. And don’t get me started on Yellow Pages Online.

10. Newspapers

I love newspapers, I really do, they serve a great part of discussion in our community, but if you think articles about Nicole Kidman’s lips or Brad and Angelina are going to lift your readership think again. Newspapers need to rebuild their classifieds to suit a new market. Once upon a time agents pushed newspaper advertising for them, only a few do now and the market is getting smaller by the day. Keep this up and classified newspapers are finished. Simple test, get two people, one in a newspaper and one online to find a 3 bedroom 2 bathroom property in Wagga Wagga.

Solution?
1. Rebuild your classifieds for ease of use.
2. Offer annual subscriptions at a loss to build base readership – $10.
3. Get into real property journalism that gets people talking. (not paid for fluff promos)

11. New Real Estate Portals

So you want to help agents get away from REA and Domain? No you don’t, you want to make money and sell out to one or the other once you have some success. Oh and $10,000 you have committed does not build you a national portal – not even built off shore. So, stop telling me you care and how exciting your product is and do the hard yards, start local and build out, and your systems had better be good!

12. Kevin Rudd

Oh Kevin you had us all, you promised so much, you work long hours and impress us with grandiose words like ‘education revolution’. Here’s the thing, deep down inside you know you are boring, we do too, but we knew that already, we just want you to make a difference, we want some bold initiatives – not only for this industry but for Australia. In 2009 there is to be no more buck passing, no more ‘we are not immune’.

We didn’t know what cards you had, we thought it must have been good, 3 deuces in the hand? A straight? A full house? A flush? A straight flush? If we find out all you had was a piddly small pair – you will be out with the bathwater. So get down and dirty, make some bold reforms and get this country back on track.

13. Printed Local Property Guides

Every week about 24 local newspapers are dumped on our doorstep (we only have 12 apartments) and every week about 23 of them end up in the trash. You all thought it was a great idea to launch a property guide. How wrong it has all turned out to be. I will give you all less than 12 months. When vendors clearly say no to agents about advertising in local newspapers you know you are in trouble, my bet is that you will keep thinking you can turn it around.

14. Agent Websites

I spent a day trawling through agent websites randomly a few days ago. I looked at over 500 sites. Ouch, apart from seeing about 100 websites that are exactly the same (template sites), so many do not work in all major browsers. Here is a hint, if newspapers are no longer viable in this climate for marketing, where is your differentiator? Yes its your website! If you have a good one, then let every vendor know about it and ask them to compare. If you don’t – then you only have yourself to blame.

15. Vanity Blogging

Everyone is getting into blogging and you should be too. However steer clear of chest thumping and telling everyone how wonderful you and your company are – because no one is listening. Write about what you know and your opinions on the market, promote local businesses and get everyone involved. Welcome dissent, as long as it is not abusive or profane – promote it.

16. Vanity Boards

If agents need a pointer as to why some people think sign boards at the front of homes for sale and rent are more about the promoting real estate agents than the properties they are promoting then look no further than those ‘look at me boards’ promoting massive pictures of agents and in most cases nothing about the property. Ok, we get it, you absolutely love yourselves and it is cheaper than billboards but just let it go, the will to want to do it, should be enough of a sign that you have lost the plot.

17. Channels 7, 9,10

So you have your own little ratings system which bears no semblance to actual figures (good to keep that ad revenue coming in) however you are all finished unless you adapt. Showing old series just doesn’t cut it (a lot of people download the new series anyway), blatant chest thumping is so 1980′s and no innovation means a slow grinding death. Think about digital, get together, innovate with set top boxes supported by all and create a new market for direct localisation of ad serving.

18. Advertising Agencies

If you want to know who NOT to listen to when it comes to marketing your products or services just look at advertising agencies. I had a taste of them in the late 90′s and thought I would go through the process again, hoping they had learnt something about the Internet since then. I am not going to name the agencies, but if the group I met are any indication, stay well away, save your money and do it yourself!

19. James Packer

James oh James, what a business you inherited, tv networks, magazines, prime Internet locations, casinos and the list goes on. Here’s an idea, lets build a business our family empire will be proud of, lets dump just about everything we have built over the years and just get into gambling. What a noble business to be in and what a time to do it? We never cared to much about how rich you were, we liked Kerry, he was like one of us, we loved his stories (even if they were myths) and we liked you. If all you want to do is make money – then good luck to you – but you only have a few billion left buddy!

20. Mobile Agents Angst

So you have a local competitor that does not have an office (road warrior) – get over it. This is the 21st century and mobile agents working from home or on the road are going to be a lot more common over the coming years. If you use your office as a springboard to connect with vendors and buyers then you have nothing to worry about.

21. Real Estate Institutes

Can someone tell me what these organisations actually do?

A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of our readers, see you all again in 2009!

Richard Freudenstein:

The Board is delighted that Greg has agreed to lead the REA Group through the next, crucial, stage of its development. We are confident he will fully realise the strategic vision we have for the company.

The REA Group has transformed itself into the second largest online real estate advertising company in the world, largely on the strength of its Australian operations.

Greg has the online and international experience necessary to grow the business from where it is today to an even larger and more successful future. This is excellent news for the real estate agents whom we help succeed and to the consumers who rely on our websites.

Greg Ellis

There is an excellent team in place at the REA Group and they have achieved great things. I am looking forward to joining them so that we can accomplish even more together.

My Comments: Firstly I would like to welcome Greg. Coming into a role in a company that already has complete market share will be nothing new to Greg, however it will be the expectations under which he is employed by the board that we will follow with interest.

I will be interested to see what changes he brings to the CEO role and how REA are perceived by agents, this is one of REA”s weak points and they need to improve relationships with agents especially after the email fiasco, which basically drove home the point and about REA being results driven rather than core customer focussed.

I wish him well and I am sure we all will judge him on his long term vision and results.

This will basically leave two companies slugging it out for search advertising, but for me the race has ended for now and it will take someone new and something innovative to topple Google.

PBL & MICROSOFT
1. It was without doubt the most anticipated launch of 2007 and is without doubt the worst major real estate website in Australasian history. I still cringe when looking at it. How could two major companies, Ninemsn and Microsoft get something so drastically wrong? Agents found themselves subscribed to a site they had never subscribed to, with listings sold years earlier. Agents also found that agents who no longer worked at their agency were listed alongside listings no longer under their agencies control.

2. MyHome struck a cord with only themselves and thus will fade further into oblivion in 2008 unless someone steps in and makes some radical changes. MyHome incorrectly perceived themselves as pretty cool. The standout memory for me was Senior Management in the Applesque (Steve Jobs) photo pose splashed in newspapers across the land. Soon, after all senior management had gone, the site tried in vain to claw back some respectability.

3. What do you do when you have a website with only 30% of your competitors’ listings and exactly the same data within that small percentage? What do you do when statistical data tells you that people stay on your website for less time than it takes to boil a kettle? It seems MyHome’s idea was to spend millions of dollars just telling everyone about it. When will it run out? Well, as soon as the people paying the bills ask one very simple question “What are we getting in return for our money?”

TELSTRA
1. Has any one company spat the dummy so many times in the past 12 months? Good ol Sol knows a good monopoly when he has one and will do anything to maintain the status quo. Many developed Nations have real broadband and laugh at us whilst we still pay ‘line rental’ and have local and national call rates, we will continue to be held to ransom by Telstra until there is real competition. Telstra have tried in vein to make the public warm to them, however the majority of Australians have an immense dislike of the company after many years of being dictated to and so are eager to move on to other offerings such as Naked DSL . (No need for telephone lines here and free local and national phone calls including broadband for one monthly fee.)

2008 will be an absolute shocker for Telstra unless it can get what it wants.

FAIRFAX DIGITAL
1. Fairfax Digital are one of the most progressive technology companies in Australia. However even big boys forget to pay their bills. One overzealous accounts department person from Web Central decided to suspend the domain name www.commercialrealestate.com.au for non payment of an $88.00 invoice. The site was down for a number of days. Of course News Ltd Newspapers made the pain last longer with many articles on this most basic of blunders.

2. Websites go down, but Domain seems to be down more and more. The reason? Who knows, from my experience it comes down to too many developments slapped on top of other projects until something simple fails and brings the whole deck down. Let’s hope it is all behind them as it makes no difference to agents invoices and only costs them potential business.

3. Adore may have had a big launch and may have had some enthusiastic backers. However, it was just another website for chest thumpers and has been slowly whittled away to nothing more than an expensive exercise. Another example of an executives idea of making more money out of agents. If the data is the same that is on a main website with all the listings then consumers will simply not bother, no matter how pretty it is.

SENSIS
1. Justlisted.com.au noted as one of the worst real estate sites ever in Australia’s big business history went for a revamp early in the year. A notice was sent out that they would be closing over the New Year and performing maintenance on their website. Some 14 days later the website was up again resplendent with all of the changes you would expect from such a significant outage– Absolutely Zero.

2. Many wondered what the hell the people at Sensis were thinking when they built a website with, well, exactly the same information as that which is on Domain.com.au. Granted it is a nice little idea, but can someone tell me why I would visit a site to search for listings which just sends me to another website to view those listings when I could have just gone to the destination site in the first place?

3. Maybe they were scared because big boy PBL got it wrong, maybe they thought it was just too hard, but by giving up on Real Estate, Sensis has become a lightweight of the Internet. With so many other web based services that are successful you would think a slow building national real estate portal would be a feather in their cap. Instead we have – well I am still not sure what we have with Just Listed.

4. I still wonder why agents spend so much money on massive ads in the Yellow Pages, I really do not know anyone who uses the print directory any more. I am sure their are hundreds of thousands who still do, but the Yellow Pages print version is destined for oblivion. Well, I thought that was the case, until a Yellow Pages executive posted a comment to my article on business2 touting that the directory was responsible for $61 Billion worth of sales to advertisers in capital cities alone! Now that is around 1/20th of our GDP. If this was the case the directory would be filled to the brim with advertisers and would need to be delivered by forklift. Of course it was internal research. So how is this done? Well just grab a calculator and multiply heaps of numbers by heaps of numbers by heaps of numbers—Easy hey!

FEDERAL STATE & LOCAL GOVERNMENTS
1. As everyone tries to find a way to get first home buyers into the market, not one government, local, state or federal have put forward one initiative that will actually make a difference. Whilst we have governments either too scared to act or too dumb to know that the crisis will grow worse year by year until a time when agents will be selling properties only to the 20% of Australians who will be able to afford them and renting real estate to the rest.

2. Thanks to the relaxing of media ownership laws we now have the competition we all dreamed of, more newspapers, television stations, radio broadcasters and lower advertising rates. Wait….no we don’t! The big boys just keep buying up other big-but-not-so-big boys.

REA AUSTRALIA
1. Around this time last year many sites starting touting the benefits of mapping and a few sites added mapping or were about to hit the horizon with mapping solutions. The CEO of Real Estate.com.au Simon Baker was having none of this, so he quickly tried to discredit mapping (to a degree) by referring to some research completed in the USA which stated that “that 88% of respondents wanted multiple pictures and slide shows, 86% wanted virtual tours, and 84% wanted neighbourhood profiles. However only 43% indicated they wanted maps and directions and only 24% cared about online mortgages‘ thereby telling us that people did not want mapping and how this research aligned with REA’s own research. Result? REA added mapping solutions and now tout the benefits of their own mapping system over their competitors. REA took an each way bet and continued with the Google Maps and is now one of the largest mapping sites in the world, their own mapping systems have taken a back-seat to the Google Maps platform.

PETER RICCI
1. April 1st 2007. Google buys REA! One of the bloggers decided to spend a little time and create a page with a press release that Google had purchased REA. I tried to call someone from REA but did not get a response. So I did what any hacker journalist would do and put up a press release and waited. It didn’t take long before I was banged to right and forced to eat humble pie, much to the delight of many.

I even received a few direct emails telling me that I got what I deserved and that I should take a course in journalism to understand the checks and balances that these journalists go through for each story they publish and how bloggers were a blight on ‘journalistic integrity’. I ate my humble pie but kept those emails just for laughs, as I love how seriously some people take themselves!

REALSEARCH
1. Real Search, yes another ‘Google of Real Estate’ – decided to launch a site and promptly sent press releases everywhere and anywhere. The site basically mined other websites for property data and presented it without the authorisation of the sites it was mining. Result? Companies started sending legal notices from everywhere and anywhere and the site was taken down within days.

Real Search has now re-invented itself and wants to hug all independent real estate agencies and help them to play on a level playing field with franchises. Funny, I thought many well run independents actually did better than franchises. We now have a countdown for launch which I am sure has changed a couple of times and around three agents across Australia are closely monitoring.

HOME PRICING WEBSITES
1. I takes me hat off to all of those house pricing websites advertising on major real estate portals. These companies basically ‘help’ people by sending their details to any agent who is willing to pay money for their information. Heaven help us if any one of these sites becomes massively popular (which they will not, especially with this business model) as agents will eventually pay through the nose for these so called ‘leads’.

The day will come when we can rid ourselves of these junk sites and concentrate on real information and real benefits for real estate agents. I am sure the real estate portals are working on their own solutions but don’t hold your breath as I am also sure that they will have some pretty juicy pricing models for themselves.

NEW REAL ESTATE PORTALS
1. This is a collective award to all of the new ‘Google of Real Estate’ portals that launched in 2007, the result being that none of them have made a difference. One day someone will release a portal, get it right and slowly build a market share without spending any money telling people about it until they get that market share. Out of all the new sites, only MyHome has a chance at this stage but they will need a brain transplant if they are ever to challenge the big boys.

These real estate portals need to go back to school or concentrate on specific areas of real estate, such as land or waterfront listings. We need something fresh and we need something that all real estate agents will embrace. Free is not free if it requires work from agents or their developers. Cheap means absolutely zero if agents do not get genuine leads.

PROPERTY GUIDES – MAGAZINES
1. Yes some of these are gorgeous to look at, but a day will come when agents say, what are we spending our money on and where are we getting a return? The result is we have more and more magazines sitting on the streets, outside empty shops and more often than not, quickly ending up in rubbish bins.

Yes, there is a place for property guides, but these companies are going to face some big hurdles in the future if they continually just dump magazines on lawns, on top of letter boxes or deliver (in my case) double the amount of guides for the number of apartments. Agents more than ever understand that these are just marketing guides for their companies and really do not do much to sell properties.

VANITY YARD SIGNS
1. A message to all of those agents who charge vendors for yard signs and then place a life-size picture of themselves on that sign with very little real property information. Clever? Maybe, but I for one would ask one very simple question.

Am I paying for you to promote yourself or for you to promote my property? Vanity signage is becoming more and more commonplace. Having a sign that tells me “I will love this place” with a big picture of a smiling person and a whopping big logo may be cheaper to produce but they do nothing for the vendor.

I pine for the good old days where a sign told me how many bedrooms, livingrooms, bathrooms, car spaces and so on and gave me a little insight into what was actually on offer and I am sure many other buyers and potential tenants do also.

TV NETWORKS
1. Oh how the Internet is hurting advertising revenues! We now have every TV network advertising business luminaries such as Gerry Harvey and John Simmons with their ThinkTV campaigns. Yes TV is still powerful (albeit shrinking). They even have their very own model of ratings (just use that calculator again) and about 3% of Australian businesses that can afford to advertise on TV!

TV is on the decline and will not be able to survive in the long term unless it gives the consumer what they want, when they want it. The only hope I see is the streaming medium whereby businesses can have their TV ads appear in certain regions for a massively reduced price. But while eyeballs are moving onto the Internet and mobile phones, if all the TV networks can do is try to hold the fort – they will die a very slow death.

NEWSPAPERS
1. Get your DVD, CD’s, Magazines and Souvenir editions with any newspaper! Read about Jennifer, Brad, Brittany, Kylie and any celebrity scandal you can think of (just get a photo and make up a story). Try as they might to grab some ‘Generation Me’ they continue to fail, despite trying really, really hard. Perhaps keeping the loyal readers might be an idea for long term survival.

Newspapers need to do what they do best and that is pure journalism instead of trumped up headlines and smut peddling (we can get that elsewhere thanks). They have made some great inroads online and I am sure they have a few years left until of course they have to bite the bullet and become FREE!

CORPSES
Here we have a bank that really knows how to sell! Firstly they repossess a home and then put it on the market for auction. Now this is one feature the new owners definitely did not pay for – a complete mummified corpse of its former owner, who had stopped making mortgage payments six years earlier.

Apparently the body, was preserved by the salty air in the Spanish seaside town of Roses and was found by, you guessed it – the buyer!

More Fun 2007 Dumb and Dumber Lists
Fortune Magazine 101 Dumbest Moments in Business
Business2 (USA) 101 Dumbest Moments
Daily News 50 Dumbest People in Hollywood

Microsoft joins L.J. Hooker, Century 21, Elders and Raine & Horne as shareholders along with the major shareholder PBL.

Here is a link to the article

This is interesting on two fronts for me, on one hand I hope it excites Google and Yahoo to do the same and enter the property market and number two for innovation and pricing – as I have always said competition is what is needed to drive innovation and keep subscription prices low for agents.

Over to you!