The Google Adplanner service allows advertisers more information on popular websites including demographic and traffic information.  Now whilst I don’t want to advertise on any of these sites we can still use the information to compare the portals and major brands in our industry and the results throw up some predictable and not so predictable results at the same time.

This article will feature a focus on Portals but the followup article will focus on the major real estate groups.

Real Estate Portals

In Australia there really is three levels of portals based upon traffic levels. Tier 1 includes Realestate.com.au and Domain.com.au. Tier 2 includes Realestateview.com.au, Homehound.com.au and Myhome.com.au.   The last tier covers everybody else.

Traffic

When you start looking at the results of the top two portals against the rest a few things really stands out . Both Domain and Realestate.com.au are far superior across all metrics  but of particular note is the pages per visit and time on site statistics.

The clearest way to demonstrate this difference is by comparing the time visitors spend on each site. This really ignores traffic counts and looks at how each site engages the visitor and keeps them on the site. Generally the longer a session time the better. Visitors to Realestate.com.au spend nearly 16:20 on the site every visit in comparison to the industry sponsored Realestateview which can only manage to hang on to visitors for  7:50 .

Another metric that really shows the difference between the top two tiers is the number of visits each visitor has to the site. With Realestate.com.au the average visitors returns 8.5 times against Realestateview.com.au just under 4 times.  This shows the effectiveness of the email alerts, property brochures and the general desire for visitors to return to continue their property search.

Google’s statistics  also confirms that the Property Seeker stats trotted out by RealEstate.com.au are totally exaggerated  but we all knew that didn’t we?.  We have already discussed this  a number of times but Google stats show the relationship between  real people and unique visitors based on cookies is about 4:10 which means their claims of reaching as many as 6 million “Property Seekers is out by nearly 4 million.   I guess if you are going to exaggerate you might as well do it with some gusto.

Demographics

The last thing that really stands out between the top two tiers is their audience demographic. All portals have a predominant female audience but both Realestate.com.au and Domain.com.au attract significantly higher levels (both at 43%) of males as a percentage of total visitors whereas the second tier all have  just 38% of all visitor males.

Realestate.com.au

Domain.com.au

RealestateView.com.au

Homehound.com.au

Myhome.com.au

Despite their similarities there are still significant differences between realestate.com.au and domain.  Domain.com.au’s audience is not only better educated but also has significantly higher  household income.

Realestate.com.au

Domain.com.au

RealestateView.com.au

Homehound.com.au

Myhome.com.au

Despite keeping visitors longer and having them return more often the trend for 2010 is not a great one for the Tier 1 portals.  Realestateview.com.au , Homehound.com.au and Myhome.com.au have all made significant increases in their traffic over in 2010 whilst Domain has stayed fairly stable and Realestate.com.au has dropped back significantly.

This loss in traffic  started with the new site but has since stabilised. Overall though REA has dropped more monthly traffic from their peak in 2010 than all the Tier 2 Portals combined.  Despite significant gains by the tier 2 portals percentage wise realestate.com.au is that far out in front that the gap seems hardly dented. The real damage will be caused if the trend continues and if it does it will  make some people very nervous at REA as they have nothing to gain and everything to lose.

Tier 1

Market Reach

At the top of the article the total reach against all Australian internet users for each site was looked at.  When you filter the audience down to those who are looking for real estate on the net the market reach becomes far more impressive.

What is incredible here is that homehound and realestateview.com.au are really closing in on Domain as far as market reach is concerned.  With realestateview.com.au recently purchasing myhome.com.au they can start putting pressure on myhome if the can add their traffic to the mix and not lose it.  Realestateview.com.au will also need to find out what they are doing wrong with session times, make their site more sticky and increase visitor loyalty.

So no matter what metric you use Realestate.com.au is by far the number 1 portal in Australia. It gets more traffic, more repeat business and is more engaging than any of its competition.  So why they try and fake their Property Seeker stats is beyond me.

(edit:  Had to fix up the Domain Education graph as it was pointing to the REA one)

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.

Much of this information is nothing new and Domain certainly provide much of this information in their suburb profile but the realestate.com.au new offering is certainly more polished than their competitor and the demand trends are unique.

Of course the new Suburb Profiles act as a teaser to upsell additional reports also available for the consumer at an extra cost. These reports would provide an additional revenue stream for both companies as they split the proceeds.

These suburbs are linked back to listings in the Realestate.com.au Sold Database which allows for agents to get better mileage out of this data.  There seems to be no allowance to preference your own sales and you can’t opt out. Agents who control most of the sales in suburbs could see a huge boost as their sales gain more visibility to consumers throughout the site.

Once all the suburb profiles have been rolled out expect to see a link from the homepage so visitors can go straight into a directory of all suburbs rather than having to find a property first..

Local Voices

The most significant change however is the new Local Voices service which is a pretty radical move by realestate.com.au but the first thing to remember is that it is nothing new. Local voices is simply a rebranding of the Street Advisor service through a new partnership deal between the businesses. So whilst this has been around for quite awhile now the realestate.com.au connection will ensure its exposure level to Australian consumers will increase exponentially over coming weeks and months.

This morning the Street Advisor (www.streetadvisor.com.au) site is redirected to its new home http://localvoices.realestate.com.au however somebody made a small typing error in the redirection and even after a full business day it is still broken and pointing to http://localvoices.realestate.com.u/ instead of http://localvoices.realestate.com.au.

This is all a bit embarrassing that it has not been picked up immediately. You would think the first thing someone would do after redirecting a major site would be to make sure it works because it has meant that the whole Street Advisor site has been out of commission for the whole day. Since the public dont really know the local voices web address yet it has not been a great day one.

Local voices allows consumers to rate individual streets and suburbs and to interact with each other asking questions of locals. The local voices system will feature the an overall rating for the suburb, what the suburb is great for, Who the locals have recommended would enjoy living in the suburb and Links to read and write reviews

The potential for abuse has been well spoken about on this site already but realestate.com.au has decided to integrate a mature system into their site rather than creating their own which should minimise any risks as most of the kinks should already been ironed out. Agents have the potential to really leverage this system by working to become a local expert in their area by providing street and suburb reviews.

As local voices is integrated into all listings on the realestate.com.au portal the fact that proactive agents are going to leverage exposure as the local expert on other agents listings is going to be a sore point for many who dont have the skills to take advantage of it or who cant be bothered. The realestate.com.au team have will no doubt have procedures in place to deal with agent complaints but dont expect too much interference and editorial control over the reviews unless they are factually incorrect, breach anothers copyright or are defamatory in nature. This is certainly how other such review systems work and the best way to counter a “bad” review is to write a better and more detailed “good” review.

A really good example of Local Voices  is Doncaster East http://localvoices.realestate.com.au/search/doncaster+east

Overall

Overall the updates seem like a good thing. There is bound to be a few bugs and issues to iron out like the redirection problem but it should not take long to sort itself out. Agents will have to do a bit of work to ensure they get the most out of these systems. Both the new Suburb Profiles and Local Voices open up additional marketing and promotional opportunties for successful and proactive agents but where there is winners there will also be losers.

They are not going to go away and will probably be very popular with consumers so Real Estate agents should develop and implement a strategy to get the most out of these new systems. Become your local area expert on Local Voices before your opposition does and ensure all your sales are recorded properly in the realestate.com.au sold database.

So what do you think of the two new features?

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!

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.

************************************************************

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!

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.

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.

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.

Reason 1
The errors and problems on the site seem to be gone now so what have you got to lose. We have been back on Myhome for nearly two months without one issue about wrong listing information.

Reason 2
Teddy Roosevelt (not Kevin Costner) first said “If you build it, they will come”.  Shane Dale has been highly successful building the connections back to the major real estate groups behind the scene.   Myhome appears to have struck arrangements with just about all the major real estate groups. They also have been re-establishing with many of the multi loaders who represent a large chunk of the independent agents.

What this means is that very soon, certainly in a matter of week rather than months, the number of properties on myhome will increase substantially. The chances are your opposition is going to be on board, so should you.

Reason 3
Only a portal with the majority of Australian agents can put pressure on realestate.com.au. If agents decide en masse to suspend their property feed to realestate.com.au then realestate.com.au will soon find what agents have known for quite awhile. Buyers have absolutely no loyalty and will abandon them in a heartbeat for somebody that does have the property for sale.

Please understand that I am not suggesting we go out and do this, just that any portal that provides that option, such as a stronger Myhome would “keep the bastards honest”. Whilst Domain is subscription based they are never going to be in a position to have the majority of offices so could not provide the leverage the industry needs.

I know we all have contracts with REA but I don’t think there is anything that says that we must send them properties. Imagine if just 30-40% of all agents stopped uploading properties for 2 months to realestate.com.au and the only place to go on the web to find the majority of  properties for sale was Myhome.  What if 4 or 5 major groups cut the feed just for a month as a form of protest?

If the properties disappear from realestate.com.au the buyers will find them wherever they have gone. Besides the press would jump all over a story like that. Before you know it buyers would soon find their way to myhome.com.au. The net effect is that in a very short time realestate.com.au’s traffic would fracture. If agents could then sniff similar enquiry levels for virtually no cost then their REA’s future income growth would be in doubt and their share price would suffer.

M.A.D (Mutually Assured Destruction) is an insane concept but it kept the superpowers in line during the cold war just because it “could” happen.  I am not suggesting we go out on “strike” against REA, not in the slightest, but just to have the ability to do it might keep them a bit more grounded. At the moment they know that there is no choice and they can do what they want with impunity.

Reason 4
More links to your website from other “authoritative” real estate websites provide better search engine optimisation. This in turn means more free traffic to your own website. The stronger your website the less your online success is bound to the portals. Too many agents have 95% of their business online generated by the portals. This is no magic bullet but is one single step in getting your website to rank better.

Reason 5
It’s FREE!  Lots of people have called for a fully featured free portal, now that it’s here we need to support it or else it may disappear and we lose it altogether. There might be a slight fee if your multi loader charges for setting up the feed but most don’t. The portal itself is free and best of all there is no contract period locking you in for 12 or 24 months.  If for some reason you’re not happy… just leave.

Shane Dale has advised me that he is even locking it in contractually that MyHome will always be free.  I will let him explain the details to us all.

Reason 6
Lets face it, any lead right now is gold and most agencies will take whatever leads they can get. Even if Myhome delivers you a handful of enquiries per week its worth every penny it costs!

Reason 7
Domain is in trouble. Many agents around the country have been sold on having a dual subscription to realestate.com.au and domain.com.au but belt tightening has seen many drop their second portal subscription and in the majority of cases that’s been domain..  Myhome can help fill the gap if you have cancelled your Domain subscription like many others at the moment and you can still promote to your owners that you upload to multiple portals.

Don’t sit back and do nothing. Agents need the free portals to be successful and this one is not associated with any competitor group so there should be no argument to get involved. If you are waiting for it be successful portal in terms of the level of enquires generated before you jump on board consider that the fact that it wont be successful unless agents get behind it.

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%.

So What!  The sales of properties that feature on realestate.com.au has dropped by 50%-75%.

How can they justify a cost of $0.77 per ebrochure as physically mailing it would be cheaper. Lets face it, the greed mentality of corporations got the world in the mess they are in today.

Here we have a company that has spent millions expanding around the world, only to have wasted a large chunk as those close and downscale their overseas operations. The world is in the middle of an economic meltdown and their main customer base that has funded this expansion is hurting. Agencies are closing down everywhere and total sales turnover is only a fraction of past of years.   To continue to show a profit so their share prices does not cop a hammering they ramp prices up to the customer base they have left. And they wonder why arrogant is the most commonly used word to describe realestate.com.au.

Is anybody else as fed up as I am with these prices rises by the greedy monopolistic corporation that is REA?  

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.

The Global Financial Crisis has put pressure on everywhere and since the results of this poll became public the roll on effect has snowballed.

Rightmove.co.uk have announced that 20% of their staff are being laid off.

Membership to an industry cooperative called the Estate Agency Buying Group (www.eabg.co.uk) quickly surges to 1600 trying to put pressure on rightmove.co.uk and all paid portals to reduce their fees.

Rightmove’s share price has been slammed particularly hard as it tumbled to 18% of its value since March 2008 and there is now rumours of a takeover.

Rightmove issued a press release stating :

1. A reorganisation of the existing estate agency sales force and customer service teams into account management teams, each covering a region of the country.
2. Greater focus on the national and regional house builders as well as the growing housing association market, with less focus on more speculative individual developments and property conversions.
3. A scaling back of the Rightmove Overseas business to reflect a decreased demand for property in continental Europe.
4. Exiting from direct selling of banner advertising on the Aboutmyplace mapping website reflecting the general excess capacity for on-line generalist banner advertising.
5. A general reduction in overheads in line with the tough trading conditions being experienced by the property industry as a whole.

Rightmove has announced increased marketing, changes to their lead response and allocation system to improve results for agents, but it seems it is too little too late.

So what lessons are to be learnt from this??

If a poll was run in Australia and local agents sent REA the same message, would they laugh it off so quickly?

Realestate.com.au must be looking hard at this agent backlash in the UK. They fill the exact same position here in Australia that rightmove.co.uk fill over there. Despite the current conditions REA are increasing their fees at ridiculous rates. They are the significant market leader escalating costs whilst many agencies are closing their doors because of turnover round 30% of the business they did the year before.  REA has also started scaling back their overseas business.

They have a reputation of arrogance and this writer believes that they have no real goodwill built up with agents, particularly over the past year where it has been one blunder after another. If the industry decides to teach them a lesson they will come out of it with more than a black eye when they get belted.

In recent months I have heard a number of industry trainers openly

Will REA learn from rightmove.co.uk’s experience or will the industry finally say enough is enough?

Should we run a similar poll?

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.

Here is the list:
1 Zillow.com [US]
2 Trulia.com [US]
3 Realtor.com [US]
4 Realestate.com.au [AUS]
5 Propertyfinder.com [UK & Overseas]
6 FindaProperty.com [UK & Overseas]
7 Primelocation.com [UK & Overseas]
8 EscapeArtist.com [US & Overseas]
9 Rightmove.co.uk [UK & Overseas]
10 Globrix.com [UK]
11 HotProperty.co.uk [UK]
12 Daft.ie [Ireland & Overseas]
13 Properazzi.com [Overseas]
14 ThinkProperty.co.uk [UK & Overseas]
15 Green-Acres.com [Overseas]
16 Kyero.com [Spain]
17 MyHome.ie [Ireland & Overseas]
18 TheMoveChannel.com [Overseas]
19 ThinkSpain.com [Spain]
20 Look4aProperty.com [UK & Overseas]
21 FrenchEntree.com [France]
22 Viviun.com [Overseas]
23 French-Property.com [France]
24 Holprop.com [Overseas]
25 Propertyworld.com [Overseas]
26 BulgarianVenture.com [Bulgaria]
27 EuropeanProperty.com [Overseas]
28 Property-Abroad.com [Overseas]
29 Zoomf.com [UK]
30 HomesGoFast.com [Overseas]
31 WorldofProperty.co.uk [Overseas]
32 HomesandProperty.co.uk [Overseas]
33 SunshineEstates.net [Overseas]
34 InSpain.tv [Spain]
35 FrenchPropertyLinks.com [France]
36 PropertyShowrooms.com [Overseas]
37 Spanish-Living.com [Spain]
38 PropertyMagnate.com [Overseas]
39 Escapes2.com [Overseas]
40 YourKeyToSpain.co.uk [Spain]
41 HomesWorldwide.co.uk [Overseas]
42 IdealSpain.com [Spain]
43 KeyItaly.com [Italy]
44 HomesOverseas.co.uk [Overseas]
45 AMLASpain.com [Spain]
46 PropertyIndex.com [Overseas]
47 Newskys.co.uk [Overseas]
48 Nestoria.com [UK]
49 Medhead.com [Overseas]
50 Libercasa.co.uk [Overseas]