This is the question that an agent posed to me earlier today after yet another stuff up by the big boys.

I was speaking at an event yesterday where one of the agents mentioned the CommBank Property Guide iPhone App and the significant amount of data that was now being made available via realestate.com.au and RPData.

As the discussion went on, one of the agents logged on and started searching through the Comm Bank’s app. Only by fluke, another agent suggested they take a look at one of his latest listings which is going up for Auction.

The listing agent was absolutely horrified to see that the property which was uploaded onto realestate.com.au as an auction now appeared on Comm Bank’s app with an asking price displayed.

The price that was displayed on the Comm Bank app was the same price that the agent had inserted under the search price field.

Any pricing entered within the search price field has always been a hidden price whether a property goes up for auction or whether it has an asking price. These prices have never been for public viewing, or at least until now.

I was blown away when the agent showed me the listing in question on the Commbank site. I couldn’t believe that something so fundamental and basic could be breached.

I followed up with the agent again today. To REA’s credit the pricing issue for that listing has now been rectified but in typical fashion the agent was told that it’s not their fault the issue seemed to be from CommBank’s side? So who’s fault is it really?

Agents don’t have an agreement with CommBank’s Property Guide app, they have an agreement with REA Group.

Under the circumstances, should agents have the option to not make listings, etc available to Comm Bank’s app?

Is this only an isolated case? Has it happened to others? Will it happen again? Can REA Group and Comm Bank guarantee that no such issue will ever happen again?

Can you imagine what would have happened if the vendor had seen it? Who knows whether a buyer has seen it or not? Does this mean that agents have to check every listing on every site that their data is being uploaded to?

NOTE: Out of respect for the agent and the vendor trying to sell their property I have deliberately left out the specific details of the price, property, area, agent, etc because sharing that information could have a detrimental impact on the result of the property auction.

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A week or so ago I was invited to today’s launch of Comm Bank’s Property Guide iPhone App (application). When I got the invite, I was interested and sceptical all at the same time (how can a bank make an industry leading property App), but intrigue, and the promise of a good breakfast, got the better of me and I went along.

Firstly, I have to say that the App itself is very impressive. I love iPhone Apps that “use” the functionality of the handset. Too many Apps are just conservative, dry extensions of the company’s website (see Domain’s App as a good example of this). They’re functional, they do a job, but are pretty uneventful, never interactive and pretty boring. The Comm Bank App uses every ounce of the handset’s horse power, and is the better for it.

Augmented reality (using the camera, GPS and orientation gizmo) is mind blowing, user friendly and very useful. During the live demo they took us outside and we stood outside a property that was for sale, pointed the camera at the property, and everything came to life…… so much information at your fingertips. You can search in more traditional ways, but the AR was the real show stopper.

Secondly, another masterstroke is buddying up with RPData and realestate.com.au for content. I’ll let you download it and judge for yourself, but it’s the sort of App that one of the portals SHOULD have created, and didn’t.

I applaud Comm Bank for a job well done (and for the great coffee at the launch).

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The new web design from Realestate.com.au was built from the ground up. Of course when you do such a major rewrite of the code you have the opportunity to massively improve certain aspects of the site by wiping the slate clean and starting again.

The web analytics for the portal has been beefed up and we are about to have a lot more data to look at. With the old versions we effectively had page views and enquiries.

One of the most noticeable impacts the new site had was on the number of property views to each property. Overnight property views dropped by around 30 to 40% across the board. This was in part due to the new user interface which allowed visitors to see more of each property without browsing on the details page. Without access to page times and other data there is no way for an outsider to know exactly how much this played in the number of page drops but account managers have been using that excuse when copping flak about the drop in activity from clients.

Mark Twain once said “Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable”

So the new weapon against agents expectations and justification of the ever increasing cost is the term “Engagement”. Better get use to it!

So accordingly to REA property views are no longer relevant and will no longer be used because “measuring by property views is too limited in light of the new richer ways consumers can interact with your listings and your brand”. The measurement and benchmarking of agents in the future will be based on “total engagement” numbers.

With the focus on engagements rather than property views it means we are not going to be able to quite so easily compare against statistics to last year or even to other portals.

So what do we know now?

There are 21 new sets of statistics across four categories as follows:

Views

1. Property Details Pages
2. Property Carousel Views
3. Property Map Fly-outs

Engagement

1. Property Photo Views
2. Map Interactions
3. Floor Plan Views
4. Virtual Tour Views
5. Property Video Views
6. Street-View Views

Saving and Sharing

1. Saved to MyRealestate
2. Notes in MyRealestate
3. Print Page
4. Send to a Friend
5. Share on Social Media

Enquiry

1. Emails to Agent
2. Agent Details Views
3. Click-throughs to Agent Website
4. Inspection Times Reveals
5. Inspection Times Saved
6. Auction Times Saved
7. Property Directions

I have also been provided with a snapshot of real data that provides some interesting early perspective.  This sample is well over 100,000 property views so it should give a great indication of what to expect when it gets rolled out to everyone.

• For every 1 property view there is 7.4 property photo views in the engagement category.
• Property Carousel views are 11.5% of property page views but only 1.5% of property photo views
• Map engagements run around 2.6% against property detail page views and from this data it shows floorplans were far more popular at 3.6% Remember, most properties have a map, but very few have a floorplan so to me this highlights the importance of a floorplan.
• Street view engagement were the least popular at 1.6% of property page views
• Saving and Sharing was very very low and all 5 types combined only added up to 2.5% of property page views.
• Enquiry statistics were even lower totaling around 1.04% of property page views. This was made up with a little under half of those numbers by email (0.45%) followed by inspection times (0.20%) and  property directions (0.15%).

I think the level of detail is admirable and it will be interesting to watch how those number relate to our own agency. Right now the markets in different parts of Australia are completley different so there should be some major differences between agencies in each state so the numbers quoted above may have little or no relationship to what you might see for your own account.

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The new realestate.com.au website rolled out in April this year.  Reception by the industry was pretty mixed and there was certainly many people at either end of the spectrum.

There was a bunch of issues at launch but most were sorted out fairly quickly. There is however a big problem that still plagues the portal today and that relates to the email updates and ebrochures.

I personally have a range of email alerts set for different combinations of streets but I keep getting emails for all properties right across the suburb for each alert no matter where they are located. This means I am getting 4 or 5 alerts for the same property but I am yet to receive a single ebrochure to match any of those alerts.

Now in the members administration dashboard we have our first notice that the prices are on the rise again starting from the 1st of August. No details have emerged yet on just what the price rise will apply to and what the rises will be.

So do you believe that realestate.com.au can warrant a price rise right now given the massive drop in property views?

After getting a fantastic result when asking for agents to send in their traffic results for their accounts I was able to compare rural, suburban and metro agents right across Australia in all states and not a single agent received higher property views from the day of  the change over.  In fact many reported Domain and Realestateview providing more enquries than realestate.com.au for the first time ever.

The new design itself also quickly revealed itself as another way to extract a greater “share of wallet”. A term that seems to be trotted out with more and more regularity. The old Guaranteed Top Spot was pushed off to the side and now more than one property can access this upgrade. Of course this caused a few hiccups and agents had to be compensated for the change of position.  The top dog now at the top of the results list is the Premier Property option which is a brand spanking new uber-expensive add-on.

So with the new site not being as popular as realestate.com.au would have hoped for, more and more add on products to compete with, continuing email and ebrochure problems and reduced property views this new round of  price rises will no doubt be a painful pill for many to swallow.

Will we all just pay the increase because we have to?

Will the emergence of a possible Industry owned portal allow agents to consider opting out of realestate.com.au?

or Will no serious challengers arrive and despite their cost realestate.com.au continue to provide the best ROI?

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It seems that realestateview.com.au wants to play with the big boys and in doing so, will definitely come under the telescope from other industry groups and agents across Australia.

Let me make this clear, I think it is great to see more competition and realestateview.com.au have certainly ramped up efforts in recent times, however there are still a number of questions that they need to address.

As realestateview.com.au are pushing ‘industry owned’, they will need to be open and transparent with the industry.

1. Ownership: As we have seen in the past with REA and the previous owners of MyHome, the issue of ownership is important and realestateview.com.au will need to make it clear who owns what % of this entity.

2. Fees: What are the basic fees and what controls are in place now and what will be these fees in 10 years time? What controls do you have in place on these fees?

3. Competition: As an industry site are you going to have your members compete against each other for the search results positions? Will there be multipler levels of memberships and if so why?

4. Visitors: Costs aside, one thing REA and Domain do very well is bring actual benefits to their members through property inquiries, how are you going to address this?

So should you support Realestateview.com.au? In a nutshell, if you are happy with the terms, cost to benefit and if there are some strict guarantees in place, then yes, however there are still some serious questions that this site needs to answer.

Technology wise, they need to take some big steps, remember, feeding to sites has a cost from most feed suppliers.

In my humble opinion myhome.com.au and homehound.com give around the same return as realestateview.com.au (enquiries are all that matter) and they are free, so I just cannot see how they can justify any costs at all until they can give a return and put some guarantees in place. Otherwise all you are doing is building up another portal who can hurt your wallet later.

We need competition to keep domain and REA in check and being cheaper doesn’t cut it, you have to provide value for money and time!

I am all for competition, but at this stage realestateview.com.au are asking more questions than they are answering.

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