I reckon realestate.com.au has been a little like a talented friend that we had as children. We all had that friend who was really good at a particular sport, or a specific subject at school. It just seemed to come naturally to them without any effort at all and they frustrated the hell of you just as much as you admired them.  No matter how hard you trained or studied you could never ever match what their natural talent and potential provided them. But despite all this they never really became world class and failed to pushed themselves beyond what they had to do to win at the school level.

The realestate.com.au portal has been like this. It’s old and tired and they never really seemed to push any boundaries because they were number one by a clear margin.

Now, I understand the whole concept about not fixing something if its not broken, but despite being the clear leader in the real estate industry online – the realestate.com.au portal has required a much needed overhaul and despite a tart up here and there every few months, it has left most unimpressed.

So, when it was announced that realestate.com.au were working on a major upgrade the industry collectively sighed as one,  ”it’s about time”. The first shock came when a proper beta test was released.  Up till now all updates seemed to have little discussion with agents, buyers and sellers, so the fact that they actively involved people from all three groups to participate in a beta program was a great harbinger of things to come.

Of course they were not going to listen to every bit of feedback they were receiving. During the process one  of the most popular complaints as voted by the beta testers themselves was the sheer number of adverts on the site.  It would take a fairly massive shift in thinking for the the adverts to disappear.

Anybody testing the site throughout the day today would have been subjected to a number of crashes – however the good news is that these seem to have been reduced significantly by this afternoon as they probably tweaked their servers and adjusted their load balancing.

Because the upgrade was based on totally new code  from the ground up it is not surprising that there were a few niggling issues when the new site  was upgraded from a few hundred beta testers to the whole shebang.

So whilst we gave you our initial opinions on the BETA test in the coming days and weeks we will give you a range of reviews and opinions from a number of the contributors. If you have checked out the site today whats your initial opinion in a nutshell… dud, master stroke or maybe somewhere in between?

So what are we going to see next?

One rumour that’s been flying around for quite awhile now is that realestate.com.au is going to integrate a review system into their portal. Back in February last year Dave Platter (ex- Corporate Public & Investor Relations Manager at The REA Group) as a then contributor to this blog tested the concept on the readers with a post called “Here’s one way real estate agents can control the web’s future“. Of course Dave was quick to point out that he and Shaun DeGregario the then realestate.com.au General Manager both denied that the company had any plans to integrate such a system into the portal.

Yeah… right.. Who do they think they were kidding! The fact that Dave quoted Shaun in the first place only seemed to confirm to many that they were considering the idea but wanted to test the waters first and gauge agents opinions.

How things have changed in just 20 months. Dave is no longer at REA, Shaun has moved away from the main realestate.com.au business to be the General Manager – International for REA and the drums are beating with a review system to be integrated into realestate.com.au which will be announced to agents next week.

With no concrete details to share its a bit hard to comment too much other than it will involve some sort of feedback system for visitors. This change will obviously try to make the whole experience to be far more interactive for visitors which is certainly a trend at the moment with large portals. Online reviews are nothing new and sites like Google, eBay, Amazon and YouTube all feature visitor reviews. If done right realestate.com.au might just have the jump on Domain again but if done badly they are going to feel the wrath of quite a lot of agents as their reputations are tarnished.

Online Reputation Management (ORM) is very important for agents right now and I wrote an article on the Ugly Side of Twitter covering this very problem but its just as relevant to all forms of social networking. Facebook is a little different and the potential for damage from sabotage or underhanded tactics is minimised due to Facebook’s privacy and security settings.

The sheer market dominance of realestate.com.au means that they have to get this right the first time. Of course the decision to release this sort of system won’t be a rushed one as there has been nearly 2 years at least of the idea maturing at head office. I would like to think they have listened to agents concerns during this time and have a well thought out strategy to launch.

Of course only time will tell so keep an eye on your inbox next week and an open mind.

Realestate.com.au has been applying updates to their portal fairly regularly recently and sometime late Tuesday night or the early hours of Wednesdays morning that applied another update to at least the individual property pages.

Phone Numbers Hidden

This time they have hidden the agents phone numbers behind some javascript code requiring the visitor to click on the “Phone This Agent” option to get access to this.

What happens is that when you click on it a Javascript Onclick command generates a pageview is counted in their web analytics program to a page called /buy/interaction/agentphonenumber.

It seems from this code that they use the hosted version of Google Analytics called Urchin.

It’s important at this point to highlight that this is the normal way to track “click” events in this program and it will not increase their pageview counts with Neilsen’s Net Ratings at all.

I thing we might be soon seeing realestate.com.au capturing these pageview to add to their monthly reports back to agents with wild claims that they generated xxx,xxx,xxx number of phone calls to our mobile and office numbers.

Phone Numbers Displayed

The page is certainly looking a lot cleaner than it was but since I don’t have a before screenshot from a year ago it is hard to put the finger on exactly everything that has been updated unless it is functionally different like the phone numbers.

It reminds me of the “trick” to ask someone to describe their own wristwatch in detail without looking at. Before you look at your watch answer these questions. Does your watch have a second hand? Is there number six on your watch dial, just a dash or is it the Roman Numeral VI or is there nothing there at all?

Their point is there is a big difference between observing something and seeing it. Something that we use and see everyday but it just becomes part of the furniture and you just accept it without really observing it.

Now I have said that.. I am not really sure that update happened overnight at all!