As we predicted Realestate.com.au started implementing a major upgrade today and are due to roll it out across all suburbs over the next few days. The update includes New Suburb Profile pages and realestate.com.au Local Voices.

New Suburb Profiles

The new suburb profiles provide additional sales data on each suburb including monthly and annual median house data, supply and demand trends and local sales data. Much of the data is obviously been sourced from RPData through their renewed commercial relationship. The supply and demand trends seem to be the exception and calculated from realestate.com.au intelligence comparing the number of buyers looking in an area relative to the number of available properties. Read the rest of this article »

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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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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UPDATED

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

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

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

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

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

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

HOWEVER!!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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When the major real estate portals conduct their own client surveys the questions are obviously limited and never compare them openly to their competition. Also the published results are often handpicked to show them in the best light rather than an full, honest and open view of the results in a totally transparent manner.

That’s why I have created a survey using the QuestionPro online survey targeted to the Real Estate Industry Participants on the subject of Real Estate Portals, their impact and their future in the industry.

Once the survey is closed I will post the results on this blog. In fact I will also release all information to any real estate group or portal who wants it. Please contact me direct to request a copy of the data.

Please pass the survey aussierealestateportals.questionpro.com to everyone you know in the industry.

It would be fantastic if some of the real estate groups could also forward the survey out to their membership as the more people we get to complete the survey the greater cross section of results we will get and the better understanding of the industry’s opinion on this topic.

You can be anonymous if you want to however if you leave your name and company it will place better emphasis on your selections and comments.

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Whilst there has been a great deal of discussion on the Google Real Estate launch here in Australia there may be an even bigger blow by the internet giant about to be delivered to our industry.

In March this year a strange thing happened in the US when searching on Google. Websites that have never ranked on the front page for highly competitive keywords started to climb the rankings and replaced sites that seemed entrenched in the top 10 results. You might think this happens all the time but it doesn’t. Getting into the top 10 results for a competitive keywords takes a significant investment in SEO.

Using our industry as an example, ranking well for such highly prized keywords like real estate, property, homes for sale and other is not a very easy thing to do and the first thing you notice is that realestate.com.au is first for all three searches. However what a lot of people don’t realise is that out of the 30 results across all three searches very little of them are taken up by any of the major real estate groups or their members.

Obviously some of the other portals were on the first pages for all three searches and they fill another 13 of the the 30 positions. This means nearly half of the premium spots are filled with what I call minor sites with very good, or very lucky SEO.

To give this some perspective the private sales website, PropertyNow.com.au ranks a very commendable 4th position for the term “Real Estate” for pages in Australia on Google. This is behind major industry heavy weights that don’t even rank on the first page. In fact only the First National corporate website is the only group that appears on the first page as it comes in at number 6.

Using Google Trends to display their respective search traffic (http://bit.ly/qXF0k) we see that Propertynow.com.au is punching well above its weight. In fact it does not even show on the graph against Ray White and LJ Hooker even though they could only manage pages 2 and 5 respectively on the Search Engine Results Page.

In March Google rolled out what has been now called as Google’s Brand Update in the US. What happened was well known and popular brands started to appear high in the search engines results replacing those smaller sites that have elevated their position due to clever SEO work.

In the past week Google has also rolled out these changes to the UK. This article has a great explanation of it all here –  http://www.seobook.com/google-branding and for a recent update on its rollout in the UK you can read this http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/google-brand-update-hits-the-uk/

It seems natural to assume that major brands are going to get a boost in search engine rankings at Google for Australian searches so pretty soon we are going to see a shake up in the traffic generated to the major real estate groups.

This spells trouble for the FSBO sites and other smaller property portals. Those members of major real estate group can probably see the upside of this article… but on the flipside I am sure the independents and those in smaller franchises and groups are probably seeing it in a completely different light.

When you start doing suburb and regionally targeted searches then the impact will really be felt by the independents and those in real estate groups not identified as being an industry brand. If the offices aligned with major real estate groups start to get a boost the traffic to many independent’s website might start to slow up.

In spite of recent pressures on the major portals, something like this MAY make the role of the major property portals even more important especially for the independents which I believe make up the majority of the agencies in Australia….. Well that is as long as Realestate.com.au and Domain.com.au actually get the benefit of this change.

Nobody actually knows what Google is going to consider as a brand and how it ranks those brands. It is certainly possible that Google may not consider portals or data aggregators like realestate.com.au and domain.com.au as brands under real estate at all.

If google determines exactly what is an industry Brand based on what people search then all the portals may be in for troubled waters. Whilst they generate a lot of traffic very little of it would would be generated on searches by the public actually searching for them or about them. This post looks at the relationship to Google Brand Updates in the UK and what people actually search for http://bit.ly/1ap0Iy and if its right then the portals might be getting nervous.

To prove this I used Google Insight for the top two portals of realestate.com.au and domain.com.au and Ray white and LJ Hooker and you can see very view people actually search for the portals by name. See this http://bit.ly/mLNqx

If on the other hand they base it on how many visitors each website gets then you would have to think they will be considered as the industries top brands. One thing is for sure, there is going to be some nervous people at the portals until we find out just which side of the fence this is going to fall because this is the last thing they need.

Major real estate groups seem to be the only guaranteed winners and independents as the only guaranteed losers. With the UK update just released it will be interesting to see if any of the UK portals start losing traffic as this might be the best indicator of how the change will effect us once it arrives, as it surely will.

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Late last year in a thread about the relaunch of Myhome I commented on this  blog that I was willing to reconnect our property feed to Myhome if they fixed their data accuracy issues. That bear seems to be back in its cage so we reconnected our feed.

Since returning to Myhome I am happy to confirm absolutely no problems so far. Of course right at the moment we are not getting swamped with enquiries but any extras at all right now are much appreciated.

So the question remains why should Australian agents start using the myhome service?
First of all let make this clear. I have absolutely no Myhome agenda, I have no connection with the company other than as an agent who uses the portal, and the only reason you should proceed with Myhome is if its good solution for you and your agency.

Another thing worth pointing out is I started writing this article early last week prior to my previous articles about the on the recent REA price rise and the subscription price freeze. The timing is purely coincidental.

Read the rest of this article »

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Agents in general are doing it pretty tough at the moment and instead of lending their customer base a hand and freezing prices what does realestate.com.au do….  Rocket prices up even further!

I was once told by a friend that if you have bad news to deliver send it out on Friday and if its good news, send it out first thing Monday morning.  No surprise then that the email that arrived on 4:30pm on Friday Afternoon contained bad news.

Hidden near the bottom is an article about prices rises from the 1st of February that cover Feature Property & Feature All PLUS, eBrochure & eBrochure ALL, Guaranteed Top Spot, Banner Advertising.

Where are the details of the actual price rise. Not in the email!. You have to login to read it. With xml feeds the norm how many offices actually login to REA these days. In fact, how many agency owners and manager login at all?

Now back in August you could get a feature property for $75 per month. Now 7 months later the same feature property will have had two prices rises to now be $95 per month.  That’s a 26% increase in just 7 months which equates to 45% per annum.

Outrageous!

Disgusting!

Ridiculous!

In fact if I would have had the rates for the other items being increased some of them might be even increasing even higher.

Lets put this in perspective realestate.com.au.. over the past 12 months as Realestate.com.au claim that UB’s and visits are up by 15%.

Read the rest of this article »

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Last month in the UK an industry blog called Estate Agent Today (www.estateagenttoday.co.uk) started a visitor poll asking agents if they were going to renew there subscription with the UK’s leading website, rightmove.co.uk.

That poll revealed that 75% of UK agents would not renew their subscription with the portal when they fell due. This has lead to many weeks of hot discussion in the UK ultimately resulting in some massive changes in their industry.

Could a similar situation arise here in Australia if agents were forced with rises in fees in trying times by one of the major portals? In Australia realestate.com.au is in a similar position and has made it clear they will be increasing fees significantly.

Firstly, to put this in perspective, as Simon Baker commented on his site PropertyPortalWatch, anybody could complete the poll. This meant that the results were not going to be an accurate representation of exactly who would cancel. It revealed more the underlying sentiment of the industry and since then UK agents have been extremely vocal about the way they have been treated.

The agent complaints centre on two major issues, Rightmove’s fee structure and their attitude towards agents. Sound familiar?

Many agents started to advertise their rental properties more so Rightmove went for the jugular going so far as to increase rental advertising costs by 30% in the past year. It is no wonder that they lost 500 agents in July and has been losing around 300 agents every month since.

Read the rest of this article »

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Seattle based Internet marketing firm SEOMoz launched its new Trifecta tool this week. This tool tries to measure the importance of a website, it collates a number of factors including Google Page Rank, incoming links, news articles and traffic sources – such as Alexa.

It is a pretty rough guide, but in principal it should work reasonable well. Many companies want this space, because with it comes advertisers….and they pay. Google, Yahoo and MSN are all getting in on the act as well.

This survey is all about real estate, and what they have tried to do is put together a big list of all of the major players in the market, you can read it here, however a list is provided below. Australia’s own Realestate.com.au is actually ranked number 4, which is pretty impressive.

Read the rest of this article »

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Okay, a couple of things have really been getting up my goat lately and I think agents should address these with their next sales representative meeting.

Cheaper than newspaper advertising: I am getting sick and tired of hearing this argument from portals sales representatives, comparing newspaper advertising with online advertising is ridiculous. You don’t have be Einstein to understand the bleeding obvious. Yes it is cheaper and so it should be, they are completely different models.

Advertising: David made a valid point – a point that seems to be rolled out by the majors these days and that is that advertising alongside your listings is a ‘harsh reality” of the online world. This is complete and utter rubbish. It is a reality for companies that just try to make more and more and more money each year out of real estate agencies listings.

Advertising next to listings should be complimentary and should not affect the agents content coming first, this is a 100% benefit to the users of the site – users that go to these sites to look at property listings – not to have ugly banner advertising disturb their viewing and pop ups, pop unders and any other rubbish get in the way of the very data they are looking for.

Premium Listings: This is another feature that continues to grate me. Some agents pay a premium to have their listings appear higher than their competitors. The difference between two agencies is more about the quality of the data, whether it be information text, photos, tours or videos than where their listing appears in search results. So what happens when the majority of agents in your area are premium subscribers? Correct, you are all back to square one and you all have a higher price to pay! If you want to set yourself apart from your competitors, concentrate on the quality of your data and that will be the only difference you need.

Price Rises: No doubt REA will increase fees this year again. Why? Because they can. Small companies cannot do this and I hope competition does bite and a price increase is placed on hold. Think about this, the price of running servers, bandwidth etc have dropped by about 500% over the past 5 years, yet prices continue to rise from the majors.

If prices rise, then show us what more you are doing for agents and consumers to warrant the price increase. Simply raising fees for no other reason than satisfying shareholders is no longer good enough.

Statistics: I know REA is beating their main competitor but visitors/page view increases mean nothing to an agent on the ground if they are not getting any more quality enquiries. This is more about attracting advertisers than making agents feel any better. In fact I think it backfires in relation to agents, because unless they are doing better – then fee increases only bite agents/vendors pockets…

MyHome: If MyHome release a site full of advertising like the horrific Ninemsn.com.au then they can throw their marketing millions out the door immediately. If they are smart – it will be a fast/effective site that is all about property listings. If they only have 30% of all available listings and only the same data (doubt it will be different) as REA or Domain on launch then promoting it all over their networks will only cost them millions.

Remember Sensis Search – before stats came out their CEO said it was on track – yet it gained less than 1% of the search market and I doubt hardly anyone deliberately uses it.

So, portals have some work to do, the game is not over yet and if Google, MSN and Yahoo go for Real Estate in a big way you can be guaranteed things will change very quickly.

PS: Don’t forget to get your Gravatar by going to http://site.gravatar.com

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