The Australian Real Estate Portals Survey is now closed and the results are in.  Overall we had over 500 people who viewed the survey and 92 participants complete it in full. None of the questions were compulsory and not every question was answered by everybody.

Several of the questions required choices to be selected against 16 real estate portals.  I tried to include a collection from the subscription, free, state based and niche portals, specifically the luxury portals.

Performance

It’s probably no surprise to anyone but the portal with the overall best result on performance was realestate.com.au with less than 15% of people indicating they were dissatisfied by their performance and over 68% claiming they were satisfied or very satisfied with their performance. The small remainder had a neutral response.

In contrast Domain had a significantly larger 27% of people dissatisfied and a lower 40% satisfied. Still we are talking about performance  here and Domain still delivers so all in all fairly good results in comparison to the rest of the portals. Domain Prestige on the other hand gave a pretty poor result. Despite the fact that only 20 people actually provided a rating only one person indicated they were satisfied by their performance.

Homehound and Myhome came in pretty similar with around 50 people providing a rating. Both have a few more people dissatisfied than they do satisfied but the most popular result response was in the middle with Neutral. I guess you can read into that they are doing an Ok job!

Google Real Estate had just 20% of participants indicate they were dissatisfied but a massive 37.5% indicated they were satisfied. That performance satisfaction rating was nearly as good as Domain’s and is really quite surprising. In just a few weeks I cant see how Google would be close to Domain on a performance level. Then you have the fact that Google just passes on the inquiry to their own website or one of the other portals so it would be pretty hard for the average agent to quantify the results from Google Real Estate.

Whilst the number of respondents for the two free luxury portals were a lot lower those that did respond did not find much to be satisifed about the performance in either Millionplus or Luxuryhomes.com.au.  The three state based real estate portals provided a mixed bag of results. The number of respondents for each was naturally much lower but Realestateview.com.au was the standout performer followed by REIWA and a relatively poor results for realestateworld who struggled with only two people wishing to record satisfied results.

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The Real Estate Institute of NSW (REINSW) and EAC have launched Realestateworld.com.au today in beta mode. It is my understanding that an official launch is due tomorrow and that the site will be in full mode with listings within 2-4 weeks.

The site is pretty clean and simple to use, but be warned there are not many listings at this stage as they are just beginning the migration of data. First thing I did notice is that you must type in www. before the name ( i really do hate having to quote www. as www. is just not needed if the site is set up correctly) and this should be fixed immediately on the server side. (Update: Fixed)

I also notice that there was no RSS feeds and only a email subscription and alert service at this stage. Any new site should include RSS feeds and they can be pretty simple to set up.

Each property view shows 4 photos with an option for more and includes a decent size map or the area (Google Maps). The site has a few good little Ajax features such as the ability to mouse-over and see your last search. All in all not a bad effort and better than most new sites I have seen recently. I am a little under whelmed by it all but maybe that is because there are just so many sites popping up recently.

The site was designed and developed by EAC/Red Square who are one of the big few companies that have not been gobbled up by a major media player (Portplus as well). I do like the fact that the site is also XHTML valid and the site is clean and user friendly. We should see most of the minor glitches taken care of over the next few weeks.

Only time will tell if it does have any impact and if NSW Agents get on board en masse and although they have a decent site, it is all now down to marketing and agents perception. That my friends is a tougher sell and it will be a slow site to take on and this is where it will be interesting to see the strength of commitment from REINSW over the long haul.

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